


Nothing Lasts Forever

by hmweasley



Series: Piece of Forever [4]
Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-07-19 06:54:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 70,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7350466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hmweasley/pseuds/hmweasley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leah did it. She admitted her feelings to Embry, and now they're together. That didn't mean that everything was suddenly perfect. Between the continuing tension surrounding Rachel's move, something strange that may or may not be going on with the Cullens, and her own relationships, Leah has more than enough to deal with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. January

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go with the fourth story in the Forever series. A huge thank you goes to KBelle1 and TheEagerScribbler (both FFnet usernames) for beta reading this chapter. I hope you all enjoy it!

**January 13th, 2010**

Packing up boxes wasn’t typically a tearful event. Rachel also wasn’t typically a tearful person.

Today was an exception.

My eyes shifted to where Rachel was packing up dishes, a simple task that shouldn’t have required much emotion to accomplish. Despite her back being towards me, she reacted as if she felt my gaze, stiffening and staring into the box as she rearranged it again. I knew that I had agreed to lend a hand, but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable. I didn’t handle other’s tears well, and it became more difficult when the tears were coming from someone I had never seen cry before.

Actually, that was a lie. I had seen Rachel cry once, and that had been at her mother’s funeral. Packing up a house she’d lived in for less than a year seemed inconsequential in comparison, but I understood that she wasn’t crying over the house.

I fiddled with the DVDs I was sticking into boxes, wanting the task to take longer than required. The longer I worked on this, the longer I could go without speaking and pulling Rachel out of her emotional packing. There were only three DVDs left on the shelf in front of me. My eyes flickered over to Rachel again, managing to catch the glint of light off the ring that had been newly placed on her finger.

With a sigh, I dropped the last three DVDs into the box and closed it up. I stood slowly, still trying to capitalize on time. Rachel had been hunched over the same box in the time it took me to pack three. She didn’t hear my footsteps as I moved towards the kitchen. I watched her as she continued to rearrange the box like she wasn’t ready to close it up. Of course, my eyes were drawn to the ring again. They had been a lot when I’d seen Rachel over the past couple of weeks. I still couldn’t believe it was there, and it made focusing on anything else difficult.

Once upon a time, I had considered Rachel Black to be the easiest person to understand in La Push. Even though our lives had gone down different paths, there had been something about Rachel that I just understood.

Recently, I had struggled and struggled to achieve the same understanding that had once been natural between us. As soon as I thought I had figured Rachel out again, she did something else that threw me off course.

Buying a house in Forks. Accepting a job in Seattle. Accepting Paul’s proposal less than a month before she moved away for said job. I couldn't keep up with each of the decisions she made that hinted at different wants.

Rachel looked up from her box, and it was too late for me to divert my gaze from the ring before she saw what it was I had been looking at.

I felt sheepish as Rachel gave a short, wet chuckle. “Is it that mesmerizing?” she asked sarcastically.

It wasn’t. I could tell that Paul had bought the ring in a panic when she told him she was leaving. Although he had to have been saving up in order to afford it, it wasn’t that remarkable of a ring.

I knew that wasn’t the point. The ring was an unspoken statement Rachel and Paul were making, but I wasn’t sure who it was for: themselves, each other, or their friends and family. I did know that I wanted to believe the statement and that Rachel needed to believe the statement.

For once, I thought I did believe it. If there was one relationship that I was rooting for beyond my own, it would have been Rachel and Paul’s. I needed them to be okay in the end. It had become this desperate need in the pit of my stomach as if it would somehow prove something that I needed to be proven.

When I didn’t answer her, Rachel sighed and stood from the kitchen floor, picking up the box and setting it on the counter between us.

“I know I’ve been avoiding asking you this,” I began, feeling like I needed to say it, “but why? I just...I just want to try to understand because I don’t get it.”

Rachel grinned, but she also shifted from foot to foot a few times before settling down again. “Neither do I to be honest,” she admitted. “I mean, I do in that I obviously said yes because I have every intention of marrying Paul, but yeah, everything’s kind of…” She waved her hands around in the air in lieu of choosing a word. I wasn’t sure there was a good one to describe this whole ‘thing’. It seemed incapable of being contained in one mere word.

I began fiddling with the roll of duct tape that sat on the counter, folding the edge down to create an easy place to peel it from. It gave me something to do.

“I never wanted to be Emily,” Rachel continued. She turned away from me to begin putting silverware in another box, and I was confident that it was to avoid looking me in the eye. “Marriage was never a be all, end all for me. It was something I would do if I met someone I loved enough, but I’ve never needed it like Emily does. For all I know, Paul and I will be engaged for, like, ten years or something. What I do know is he’s the only person in this world I would bother to marry. We might as well be engaged. We both knew it was leading to that anyway.”

She hesitated, moving some forks to the opposite side of the box, before she continued speaking. “And I know that Paul needs this, needs the reassurance. I wish he didn’t, honestly, because he should know that I’m not leaving him, but as it turns out, an imprint doesn’t mean unwavering confidence in your relationship all the time. Proposing made him feel better, and it doesn’t change anything, so of course, I accepted the ring.”

“I get all that.” And I did. It all made sense to the point that I wasn’t sure what was still bugging me, but there was something there. “It just feels like such strange timing.”

Rachel smirked, glancing back at me. “Because it is,” she admitted. “No one would argue that, but you know what else was strange timing? Me being imprinted on during my first visit home in years when I didn’t know wolves and imprinting existed. That threw my entire life through the shredder.”

I stared at her. She was right, and now that I thought about it, the confusion I had felt watching both events unfold had also felt remarkably similar.

“I’ve stopped trying to figure it out, Leah. I’m doing whatever the hell I can at this point.”

There was a surprising lack of bitterness in her voice. I’d have felt rather hopeless if our situations were reversed, but Rachel sounded like she had moved beyond being resigned to having embraced the situation. Despite her continued tears as we packed.

“I wish I could stop trying to figure it out,” I told her. “Blame Embry. I swear I didn’t care this much about figuring out fate and the meaning of life or whatever shit he goes on about until he got ahold of me. Now I obsess over the pointless.”

Rachel’s smile softened as she looked at me, but she didn’t offer any response to my complaints about Embry.

“Can you take care of the pots and pans in that cabinet by the oven?”

I took up the task without verbally agreeing to it, taking the largest of the empty boxes with me as I went. The clanging of the metal as I worked was some of the loudest noises I’d heard in the house today, and I wondered if Rachel had given me this task to shut me up. There was a possibility that she was also clanging the silverware around more than necessary.

Once she had closed the box of silverware though, Rachel began to speak as if our conversation had never come to an end. “I admire how Embry tries to figure everything out. Even if it’s a little on the intense side.”

I snorted. “A little,” I repeated. “He’s always trying to figure something out.”

Rachel nodded and offered a shrug. “Different people have different approaches to life.”

There was no way I could disagree with that after the conversations I’d had with Embry over the years.

“You agree with me though, right?” I asked. “That trying to figure everything out is useless. Because Embry never accepts that, but you and Paul seem like a testament to everything I’ve told him.”

There was this small grin on Rachel’s face that I thought might have come from hearing me talk about Embry, but I chose to ignore it. “I don’t know,” she admitted, and my shoulders sagged in disappointment. I had expected easy agreement, for at least one person to back up the arguments I had to support on my own when I was talking to Embry.

“I mean, he is always trying to figure out stuff that he’ll never actually figure out,” Rachel continued. “I’ll agree with you on that much. What I don’t understand is why it gets you as worked up as it does.”

She analyzed my face as if looking for something specific, and I couldn’t help but shift under her gaze, glancing away. I wasn’t sure why I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know the answer either once I stopped to think about it.

“I just-” I stopped to collect my thoughts. “It’s just that, like you said, he’ll never figure it out.” It was the only way I could think to justify myself. “None of us will, but every time he brings it up, it’s like I’m being taunted by fate. It would be easier to not think about it at all.”

I thought I was telling the truth, but to be honest, I couldn’t be sure. I’d always thought Embry made me think about things, but he’d never made me question the emotions behind certain thoughts like Rachel currently was. It was like confronting another thing I didn’t want to think about, even if I didn’t understand why.

Rachel gave a short nod as if I’d given her a clear answer. “You’re someone who doesn’t want to discuss what you’d rather forget. Embry, on the other hand, wants to analyze them and understand them to make them less intimidating.”

I blinked at her, knowing that she was right. I’d always known that much. It shouldn’t have felt like a revelation. I was sure I’d said the same thing in different words more than my fair share of times. It was just, like Rachel said, that I didn’t like to give it more thought than I had to.

“I still don’t get why understanding something you can’t control makes any difference.”

With a shrug, Rachel reached out for another box. “I don’t get it either. I just know that it’s what Embry seems to do.”

She had nothing else to say about Embry. I could tell by the way her attention had shifted away from me. She brushed past the counter that I stood at, walking into the living room. The bookshelf had already been shuffled around when I arrived. The items that had been occupying it were grouped together in patterns that showed they were being prepared to be packed away, not to look nice on the shelf. Rachel started placing some books into the box she’d carried over.

Since I hadn’t been given any instructions, I turned around to face the living room and Rachel, leaning back against the counter. I felt tired despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything that could be considered heavy lifting while packing up these boxes.

Rachel’s ring glinted in the light as she moved, and I couldn’t help but wonder for a moment what the future would look like. I knew Rachel didn’t have any answers to give me, but I could remember Embry’s speculations over the last month. They ran through my mind as they had often over the past weeks.

But I couldn’t change anything, and Rachel had been right: I’d much rather not think about it.

**January 22nd, 2010**

“Last one,” Paul grunted as he carried a large box out the door of what had been his and Rachel’s house. I wasn’t sure how to refer to it anymore. They still owned it. I was pretty sure a mortgage was being paid by someone even if I didn’t know the ins and outs of it.

Neither Paul nor Rachel would be living there anymore, and their plans with the house had been one of the countless things they had both stayed quiet about. I’d kept expecting Rachel to bring up selling it over the days I had talked to her about the move, but either they hadn’t given that any thought or she didn’t want to talk about it with me. Both Rachel and Paul tended to close down and start avoiding questions if anyone remained on the subject with them for too long.

I watched from the backseat of Sam and Emily’s car as Rachel directed Paul on where to fit the box into the trailer hitched to her car, which was parked in front of us. Kim in the backseat beside me and Emily in the driver’s seat both watched too. While I couldn’t say for sure, I was confident that they felt as much trepidation over agreeing to this trip as I did.

Rachel stood on her tiptoes to kiss Paul goodbye, and I averted my eyes, not glancing back up until I heard Rachel open the passenger side door of the car we sat in. Paul had already disappeared into the other car with Jake, Sam, and Jared. I settled back into my seat, trying to prepare myself for the three and a half hour drive to Seattle.

There was this ominous atmosphere in the car that I didn’t think was coming from me. Kim was twitching; I could see her out of the corner of my eye. She was always sensitive to the moods of others.

Emily put the car in drive, following the guys down the road, and none of us said a word. I was both tempted to break the silence and worried that I would ignite a fire if I did so. While Emily and Rachel had been making progress towards repairing their friendship, Rachel accepting this job had turned Emily cold again. A fact that Rachel was ignoring.

We’d made it several blocks down the road before Rachel flipped the radio on, keeping the volume turned up high enough to fill the awkward silence.

I knew that, if any of us were going to speak, it would be Emily. Neither Rachel nor I would have been keen to get Emily talking when it could lead to conflict, and it was a rare day when Kim instigated a conversation on her own. I could see her flipping her phone over in her hands as if it were a nervous habit.

Originally, Emily wasn’t supposed to come with us, and I knew that decision had been purposeful. Rachel hadn’t wanted her here, but for days, Emily had insisted that the more help, the better. A saying that I didn’t find truthful in most situations and that I especially didn’t buy in this case. I knew Rachel didn’t either, but in what must have been a desire to stay on Emily’s good side as much as possible, Rachel had given in and agreed that Emily could come along.

Now I was going to have to sit through more than three hours of Emily’s last ditch efforts to convince Rachel that she was making a mistake.

Emily shifted in her seat as if she were preparing to speak, and Rachel turned the volume up two notches on the radio. I heard Emily’s sigh as I watched her shoulders sag from my seat behind her. She kept her eyes on the road, giving no other indication that she had made an attempt that was squashed.

I toyed with the corners of the pages of the book I held in my hands, bending them back then letting them slide between my fingers. Even when I’d picked it up to bring with me, I’d known there was only a miniscule chance that I would any of it. While no one talked, there was a palpable tension in the air that made focusing on anything difficult.

Everyone else had their eyes set out various windows, watching our surroundings as we left Forks behind. I was the only one looking around at the people I was sharing a car with. Even Kim, who was not on the receiving end of anyone’s ire, looked like she would jump in her seat if she was addressed.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like in the guys’ car. I imagined it was nothing like this, although I did imagine that the others were frustrated about having to deal with an extra pissy Paul. That didn’t sound like it came close to what I was dealing with.

My phone vibrated, and I pulled it out of my pocket, already knowing who the message would be from.

**You left?**

Only two words, and I couldn’t keep away the grin that appeared on my face. I tilted my head downward in case any of the others glanced at me. Hopefully, they wouldn’t notice. If they did, I knew that they’d guess the source right away, and for whatever reason, I still felt bashful about how strongly I felt for Embry. I didn’t like when other people could observe the effect he had on me.

I typed back, **Yeah just out of forks. No ones talking. Save me**

**:( Sorry. Figures. At least they’re not yelling?**

At least they’re not yelling. It was true. I should have been thankful for the silence.

“Did I tell everyone that Simone’s officially potty trained?”

I glanced up, catching Emily’s eyes through the rearview mirror. Her voice was peppy, and she smiled at me before she set her eyes back on the road.

“No,” I responded, knowing Rachel wasn’t going to answer and that Kim had already been told. “You didn’t. Last I heard she was having trouble with it.”

I couldn’t remember when I had been told that tidbit of information. The potty training process wasn’t something I attempted to keep up with, but I thought I might have wound up talking to Emily about it before babysitting once a few months back or something like that.

“She hasn’t had an accident in more than a week.” I wasn’t sure if Emily thought it was Simone or herself who had achieved something, but there was obvious pride in her voice.

Rachel had hardly responded to Emily’s announcement, but I noticed her head turn a fraction of an inch in Emily’s direction as if she were focused on listening.

“You’ll have to come to me for tips whenever it’s your turn, Kim.” Emily flashed her a smile through the rearview mirror, and Kim offered a small grin in return.

It struck me as an unnecessary comment. As far as I knew, Kim wasn’t pregnant, and while I would admit that she and Jared could have been trying and I was unaware of it, I didn’t suspect that was the case. I had a stronger suspicion that Emily had offered the advice for different reasons. A suspicion that was proven seconds later.

“I could give you some too, Rachel, when you need it. Lord knows I went through so much trial and error. At the very least I can tell you what not to do.”

I watched Rachel, seeing her stiffen as Emily talked, but she still didn’t look at her.

The thing was, I knew Rachel wanted to be a mother eventually, so the comment wouldn’t have been out of line under different circumstances. But I knew what Emily’s motivations were, and within the context of the move, it had me shifting in my seat. It also wasn’t lost on me that I was the only person in the car that Emily hadn’t offered her advice to despite the fact that I had never said anything to Emily about no longer wanting to be a mother since my period had stopped coming.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Rachel muttered, not attempting to hide the contempt in her voice. “When I need it years from now,” she added, almost as if the words themselves had been an afterthought. She’d whispered them, and I wasn’t sure Emily could have made them out over the music that continued to play. She did, however, know that Rachel had said something under her breath. I could tell from the way I saw her frown deepen through the rearview mirror.

Nothing deterred Emily from starting a conversation that no one else wanted though. She chanced another glance back at Kim and asked, “How is the apprenticeship going? You’re almost finished, right?”

“Right.” Kim had to clear her throat when the word came out scratchy. “I’ll be licensed in a couple of months.”

“Good, good,” Emily muttered. “I’m sure you’re both happy to really start your lives then.”

Kim averted her eyes to the window instead of answering, but Rachel let out a snort of disbelief. I couldn’t believe Emily was trying to take things this far either. The only way I could make sense of her actions was by believing that she was trying to lead Kim to the topic of marriage again as a way of shaming Rachel for not following the same path she and Kim had.

Emily’s eyes had grown as wide as golf balls when she’d noticed the ring that morning upon arriving at the house, and I’d been able to see the hurt there, too, that came from not having been told about the engagement sooner.

I also knew that it had given Emily more hope that Rachel wasn’t making as big of a mistake as Emily thought she was. Emily needed to confirm that for herself, and she wasn’t going to like how Rachel responded.

“When did it happen?” Emily asked. We all knew the question was meant for Rachel, and no one pretended to be clueless about what Emily was referring too.

Kim straightened up beside me, although I knew she had already known about the engagement. She hadn’t had the same surprised reaction Emily had had that morning. Someone, whether it was Rachel or Jared or someone else, had told her before today. I hoped Emily didn’t discover either that or my own previous knowledge because I couldn’t imagine it going over well with her.

Few things that pertained to Rachel did these days. The longer this went on, the more apt Emily was to find fault in every single one of Rachel’s actions.

“A couple of weeks ago,” Rachel answered. I could detect Rachel’s hope that Emily would offer her congratulations, not judgment. Something that I wouldn’t have been idealistic enough to hope for in her shoes.

Emily nodded. She was trying to work out how many times she had talked to Rachel since the engagement (which could have been zero to the best of my knowledge) and decide if she’d been deliberately looked over as someone to share the news with. I could also tell that she was frustrated that Rachel was answering vaguely instead of offering up the entire story.

“Oh.” She paused, glancing at Rachel to give her one last chance to speak up before she continued. “I just...wasn’t expecting it. Because of everything else, you know?”

I watched Rachel turn her head to look at Emily in slow motion, and it was hard to fight back a groan.

“Why’s that?” she asked through gritted teeth.

Emily shrugged in a terrible attempt at nonchalance. “There’s already so much going on. I didn’t expect the two of you to add to it. I mean, planning a wedding takes a lot of work, and with your job and everything else…”

“I’m not planning a wedding, Emily. Not right now.”

“Oh.” This time there was genuine confusion in her voice. Rachel had surprised her. Again. “Really? Because the ring and-”

“I didn’t saw we’re not engaged,” Rachel said, close to reaching the end of her patience. “I said I’m not planning a wedding as in I’m not planning it in the immediate future. We will, eventually, but like you said, I have to adjust to my job first.”

“Right. Well, then, let me know when you’re ready, yeah? Because I can offer you some advice on that too, help out however you want.”

“I don’t think you should hold out for that, Emily,” Rachel continued. I could hear a hint of pleasure in her voice, and I knew that she’d moved into deliberately provoking Emily. “It’s going to be a while. For now, I have my job in Seattle. Paul has the pack in La Push. Until that changes…”

I was surprised that Emily didn’t growl in frustration. She didn’t do much of anything except keep her eyes on the road and continue to drive. I wondered if I should say something about being willing to drive instead, giving Rachel and Emily a chance to duke it out without killing us—well, all of us except me—if we were to crash.

“Of course you won’t,” I said, not able to stop myself from offering Rachel support. I heard Kim sigh from beside me, and I couldn’t blame her. “Anyone would want to wait until they can live together.”

Emily shook her head but didn’t speak. Rachel latched onto my words though, and I wasn’t sure if she was still trying to anger Emily. I thought she might have begun to talk about her feelings that she hadn’t gotten a chance to share before.

“Right. I know we could do it now, but it wouldn’t be the same. I don’t see the harm in waiting for a few years for things to feel convenient. Obviously, nothing will ever be perfectly easy, but I can feel that now isn’t the right time, you know?”

“Yeah,” I responded, and I did know. I might have been the only one in the car who got it. Emily had wanted nothing more than to get married for most of her life, so there had never been a question about what was or wasn’t the right time. I didn’t know Kim well enough to know if she had held the same dream from childhood, but considering how soon after graduation she and Jared had gotten married, I figured she had.

So many people in my hometown considered getting married a crucial part in the journey to becoming an adult, and for many people, a working adult holding off on marriage didn’t make much sense. But I got it. My entire life I’d seen Rachel as different from the norm of La Push, and this was only another facet of that.

Emily tapped her fingers against the steering wheel for a moment before speaking again. “Sam told me that Paul’s trying to quit phasing.”

This was news to me, but I could tell from Rachel’s lack of a reaction that it wasn’t for her. Kim didn’t have much of a reaction either, forcing me to realize that I was the only person in the car who hadn’t heard about this.

“It’s been a week,” Rachel said. “At least, I think it’s been a week. Sometimes I wonder if he’s phased and not told me because he doesn’t want me to know how difficult it is for him.”

For the first time since getting in the car, Kim spoke. Her voice sounded more confident than her demeanor would have suggested. “He wouldn’t have been able to keep it from you. Especially not if you talked to him about it. He would have been telling the truth.”

Rachel shrugged, but I could detect relief in her eyes. She wanted Paul to be telling the truth, but part of her thought that him not phasing, even for as little as a week, was too good to be true. Hell, after everything the two of them had gone through and the way the imprint had rocked Rachel’s life plans, it probably did feel too good to be true. If Paul could leave La Push, then Rachel would have everything she had dreamt of since she was a little girl.

“Kim’s right,” Emily said. Her voice sounded comforting for the first time. Rachel had managed to hit the soft spot that Emily had been trying to lock away from Rachel in recent weeks. “And I know Paul’s telling the truth because Sam said the same thing too. We were talking about it the other day, and I think he said it had been ten days.

“Actually,” she continued, and I could tell that she was becoming comfortable with the conversation, “he said he was impressed. Him and Jared were worried at first that Paul wouldn’t manage it and would start feeling discouraged, like he’d become convinced that he’d failed you or something.” Rachel’s frown deepened, but she didn’t say anything. “Instead he’s managing better than any of them expected.”

“Jared said that he’s seemed calmer since he decided he was doing it,” Kim said. “According to Jared, it was like Paul knew that losing his temper would ruin everything, and suddenly, it became harder to get him angry. He said that they could see him getting frustrated, but he never reacts anymore, and it’s gone quicker than it used to be.”

Rachel had begun nodding along as Kim spoke. “He has,” she agreed. “I knew he was doing well with that. I actually, uh, brought him along to my therapist, and she was the one who gave him the techniques to use when he lost his temper. I never thought I’d be able to convince him to go, but he didn’t put up a fight.”

Because he wanted to make Rachel happy, and he thought going was the only way he could do that. Rachel knew that too, even if she’d been initially surprised. I couldn’t say that I was. At some point, Rachel and Paul had become unable to surprise me. No one but Embry defied my expectations more often.

That was why, while I hadn’t known Paul had stopped phasing, I couldn’t say I was surprised that he had. Years ago, I would have pegged Paul as the last of us to stop phasing. There was no way he’d be able to quell his temper for long enough periods of time to stop phasing, I would have said. But I’d known for a long time that, if Paul was terrified of one thing in life, it was disappointing Rachel, and I was unsurprised that that was enough to make not phasing an accomplishable goal for him.

He wasn’t going to phase again. I could say that with confidence that the others around me didn’t seem to share. All of them, even Rachel, were more incredulous than anything. It was a feeling that I couldn’t share, though I did feel a twinge of pride for Paul that I never would have admitted to out loud.

I fiddled with my phone, typing out **Did you know about Paul?** and sending it to Embry.

His answer came quickly considering that he was in class.

**What about Paul?**

Of course he hadn’t. If Embry had known, I would have known. I also figured that Sam’s pack was keeping it quiet at Paul’s request. No one wanted him to screw up and then feel like a failure in front of everyone. I typed out a message explaining it, keeping one ear trained on what was happening in the car.

Everyone had gone quiet, yet the wall between Emily and Rachel had fallen at least temporarily. For the rest of the drive, there was scattered conversation, none of which was hostile.

Rachel had tapped into Emily’s sympathy, and that appeared to be enough for Emily to go easier on Rachel over this move.

Once we reached Rachel’s new apartment, the guys were out of their car and unloading the trailer before Emily had put our car in park. I trailed behind the others as we got out to help them, looking around at the building that no one else was as interested in as I was.

The building that included Rachel’s future apartment wasn’t impressive. It appeared to be a little rundown from the outside, but it looked as well maintained as I could expect such a building to be. Overall, it wasn’t remarkable in looks, yet it was helping Rachel get a step closer to achieving her dream.

I stepped into the trailer to grab some boxes. Rachel, moving quickly, had already grabbed a small box of her own and hurried into the building to unlock the apartment for the rest of us. We followed her in a spaced out trail, with Paul and I taking the lead behind Rachel. I watched him as we walked, wondering what he was thinking.

I’d seen Rachel often over the previous weeks, and that had meant seeing Paul too. Yet, unsurprisingly, I had little information about how he was handling this. He acted quiet and withdrawn, a side of Paul I never thought I would see before this happened. It scared me more than I would have liked to admit. Especially after what I had heard in the car, I couldn’t help but worry about what effect this was having on him.

Rachel was all smiles as she let us into the apartment. In terms of size—the first thing I noticed—it was a downgrade from the house Rachel had lived in for the last year. As I continued to inspect my surroundings, I came to the conclusion that nothing about the apartment was remarkable, but it was also bare. Rachel had yet to get her hands on it and complete the same decorating magic she had worked on the house.

She’d already set to work, directing each of us on where to set our boxes based on the contents and where she planned to put them in the apartment. Paul, Jake, Jared, and Sam went to get another load of boxes while Emily, Kim, and I got trapped helping Rachel move the boxes around inside the apartment itself.

Reaching the apartment had put her in her element. She was no longer closed off and quiet like she had been that morning. The negative emotions had disappeared for the moment. Paul, too, appeared almost happy each time he dropped off a load of boxes, like he was feeding off Rachel’s positive energy.

Moving in boxes didn’t take much time when you had five wolves helping you. We wound up perched on the still full boxes not long after we’d arrived, almost as many pizzas as there were us scattered around the room. I kept trying to predict how the mood in the room would change as it got closer to time for us to head back to La Push and leave Rachel behind in Seattle.

For the moment, everything was fine, chipper even, but there was little hope that would last once the reality that Rachel would be gone set in. For now, I tried to appreciate that Rachel and Emily were smiling genuine smiles at each other and laughing with no pretenses. I wasn’t sure if it was a permanent fix, but at least they were no longer like they had been in the car that morning.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Jake asked from the box closest to mine. I turned to see him looking in the direction of Rachel and Emily too. “For them to not be fighting today of all days.”

“They got it out of their systems while we were in the car,” I assured him. “But you know that Emily can never stay angry for that long. She always gives in before the other person.”

“Yeah, well, no one was ever going to get Rachel to give in first. You and I both know that she’s still angry.” He’d brought his voice down to a whisper despite being easily heard by the other wolves in the small, empty space.

I nodded. Rachel was always one to dwell on things and hold grudges. She would act fine for periods of time, but you’d never resolved anything with her until you had flat out resolved it. She hadn’t achieved that with Emily. Now that she was living in Seattle, I wasn’t sure how long it would take for them to work out their issues with each other.

“I’m happy for her,” Jake continued, shifting gears. “I really am, but there’s also this part of me that doesn’t want to be here.”

“I know the feeling,” I said with a sigh. Jake nodded, looking around at the walls and ceiling of the room that surrounded us.

“This feels like the apartment we moved her into when she started college,” he told me. “The layout’s different, but kind of the same too.”

“Every apartment does have the same basic rooms,” I reminded him.

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but what I meant is that the layout’s the same except for where the bathroom is.”

He motioned towards the door that led to the bedroom and the attached bathroom that you could only get to by walking through the room.

I shrugged. “Not like there’s a multitude of options for how to layout so few rooms.”

“I know, but that doesn’t mean it’s not strange doing this all over again. Dad thought she would stick around La Push this time, and now… It’s bittersweet I guess.”

I nodded, getting what he was trying to tell me, but I knew he possessed a disappointment that I was finding it difficult to feel. Rachel Black was never going to stick around La Push, and eventually, everyone was going to have to accept that.


	2. February

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thank you to KBelle1 and TheEagerScribbler (both FFnet usernames) for beta reading this chapter.

**February 8th, 2010**

Since I had begun working, it wasn’t often that I got to experience a lazy day of sitting around and doing nothing. When I did, it was more often than not spent with Embry.

Today, however, Embry had class on the same day I was off from work. I had planned to use the opportunity to spend time alone and think about things or whatever it was I’d used to do when I spent a good deal of time alone. I couldn’t remember anymore.

Instead, I’d somehow wound up at the apartment that Embry, Quil, and Jake had begun to share. I spent a lot of time here, but I hadn’t expected to come over when Embry was gone. Jake, too, was absent, off at work. Quil, like me, had the day off and was using the opportunity to spend time with Claire.

Somehow, I had crashed that party, a product of getting bored with my own self after a couple of hours. I hadn’t warned Quil with a phone call or a text message. I’d just shown up and demanded to be let in, and he’d given in without a complaint, showing how far we’d come since the days when Quil had been one of the wolves most vocal about disliking me.

Claire was dressed to the nines in a big, puffy green and yellow dress that I thought might be modelled after the latest Disney princess. She had brought her favorite stuffed wolf along with her to visit Quil, and it remained locked in her grip as she sat on the couch and tried her hardest to play her toy keyboard with a modicum of talent. The ‘music’ screeched in my ears, and I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from telling her to shut up.

Quil wasn’t bothered by the noise, probably from a combination of having grown used to it and being unable to feel annoyed with Claire. She could have banged her fingers onto as many keys as possible in one fell swoop, and Quil would have declared it Mozart.

“When was the last time you went more than one day without showing up at our humble abode?” Quil asked, reaching for the remote so he could turn down the volume of the television enough to make casual conversation possible over Claire’s continued noise.

“I don’t come for you, Ateara.”

An amused grin appeared on Quil’s face. “Last time I checked, Embry and Jake aren’t here, and neither one of them are meant to be here for hours. That means you’re either here for me or for Claire. Or for both of us.”

“You’re a joint package anyway,” I grumbled, not answering Quil’s accusations. His grin grew larger, and I looked away from him and towards Claire, who was trying to play along to Old MacDonald as a recording of it played from the keyboard.

“She’s been practicing all day.”

I couldn’t detect any annoyance in Quil’s voice. To be fair, I had never known Quil to be annoyed by much of anything, so for all I knew, it was Quil’s own personality and not the imprint that led to him easily dealing with Claire. I thought the best explanation for them was that he’d been the member of the pack to imprint on a two-year-old precisely because he was the best equipped to deal with a two-year-old.

Claire looked up at us and beamed at Quil’s compliment. “I’m taking piano lessons soon,” she informed me.

I almost made a comment about how I hoped the lessons would make her playing less excruciating to listen to, but I managed to hold myself back. At least she was calmer these days than she had been in the past. When Quil had first imprinted on her, she’d been a bundle of energy at all times. Now that she’d started school, it was possible to get her to sit still, and she used her inside voice more often than her outside one. That had been a welcome change.

“That’s cool,” I told her, trying to summon up a modicum of enthusiasm that I did not possess.

Quil was a natural, saying, “She thinks she might want to be a pianist when she grows up, but I reminded her that it’s too early to narrow her options.”

A subtle way of hinting that music wasn’t her talent, I thought as she hit a particularly cringe worthy group of notes.

“Right,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to rule anything out too soon. Just don’t become like me and have no idea what you’re doing with yourself when you’re in college.”

“Don’t listen to her, Claire. You take all the time you need to figure yourself out.”

I rolled my eyes, imagining Quil fifteen years in the future when Claire was in college and distraught over what she was doing with her life. I imagined her as a much more outwardly dramatic person than I had been while going through the same struggle.

“You know, I like having you around, Leah.”

Quil made the comment out of nowhere, and I was startled when I heard it, turning to him with wide eyes. It was the first time in my memory that Quil had outright admitted that he enjoyed my presence, although by now I had known as much. We’d given up the pretense of not being friends a long time ago.

“Uh... Thanks I guess.”

Quil smiled with satisfaction that he’d succeeded in throwing me off my game. Most other people would have responded that they liked having him around too, but I was so thrown off by his comment that the thought didn’t occur to me until it was too late to say it. I doubted I would have said it if it had come to me sooner though. Quil was the last person that I needed to make more obnoxious by stroking his ego.

It wasn’t that Quil was arrogant so much as it was that he pretended to be those things for the hell of it. Either way, I didn’t like encouraging the behavior.

A silence fell between us that was only interrupted by Claire’s music. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with the conversation, and I waited for Quil to do anything to give me a chance to reply.

He sighed as if he knew he was about to say something that would make it more awkward between us, and I could feel my stomach tighten before the words were out.

“Also,” he hesitated one last time, “I wanted to say that I’m glad you and Embry got your sh-stuff together.” He glanced at Claire to see if she’d noticed his close screw up. She didn’t glance up from the piano keys. “I realized I hadn’t told you that. Mostly because I don’t think you want to hear it, but it’s true. Both me and Jake are.”

I stumbled over my first attempts at speaking, not having expected anything like this. Neither of us were sentimental by nature, and I almost thought that someone else had put him up to this. This couldn’t be Quil Ateara saying these things. The most I’d ever heard real emotions from Quil was when he’d gotten upset years ago when Jake and Embry both phased before him and he’d been left with no clues as to why his best friends had deserted him.

“Thanks,” I whispered. It was all I could say. I didn’t want to respond at all. Quil shutting up would be preferable.

“Yeah.” Quil was starting to get on a roll now that he’d figured out what he wanted to say. I could tell, and I didn’t like it. “Embry was always cautious when it came to girls, you know?”

“I...guess.” Back when we were younger, Embry had been nothing more than an annoying kid to me. He was four years younger, which had felt like an eternity and also meant we were never around each other at school. Until we were both wolves, I’d only known him as the kid whose paternity was speculated about and the kid who hung out with the younger brother of two of my friends. I’d hardly spared any thought to the little boy I’d played with while our mothers visited with each other. “It’s not like I was monitoring any of your love lives.”

Quil gave a short laugh. “No, I’m not sure you knew our names then.”

I had. Everyone in La Push knew Embry because of the mystery he had brought with his birth, and it would have been difficult to forget Jacob when Rachel and Rebecca often complained about him being a nuisance. Even Quil’s name had been difficult not to know when he was named after his grandfather who was a pillar within the community.

I didn’t assure Quil of any of that. Instead, I let him continue talking.

“We saw you a lot though,” Quil told me as if I couldn’t remember when we had both spent time at the Blacks’ house. “We’d be playing around or whatever, and Rachel or Rebecca would start yelling at us about making too much noise. Funny how you never did say anything considering how much I’ve listened to you complain since.”

“I wasn’t the same then,” I reminded him. “Less jaded. I don’t think I complained about much of anything then.”

Quil shook his head. “None of us thought you did either. When you were around, you never said anything to us, but we always had a feeling that you were telling Rachel and Rebecca to go easy on us when we weren’t around.”

I felt a blush color my cheeks because it was true. I hadn’t given it a thought in years, but I remembered comments here or there when I’d cautioned them that, maybe, they were being harder on the kids than they needed to be. It hadn’t been often, and I had never expected any of the three guys to remember such a thing.

Those moments were vague in my own memory.

“I guess it’s not that surprising that Embry fell for you.”

It took me several moments to have a reaction to Quil’s comment because my initial thought was that he was referring to everything that had happened while we’d been wolves. Then I took the time to think about it, and I realized that didn’t seem to be what he was saying at all.

“What?” I asked, not sure what answer I should have been preparing myself for. My mind worked on overdrive.

Quil regretted saying it. I could tell from his wide eyes and the way he was unable to sit still. Even Claire had paused her piano playing, and the absence of music made the silence feel starker than it would have otherwise.

The comment hadn’t been about Embry’s recent feelings for me. Quil had still been in the past, and my mind struggled to comprehend what that meant.

“Quil, what are you talking about?”

He floundered for a few seconds, and at first, I thought I would have to prod him further, that he would refuse to explain despite the fact that there was no acting like I was clueless anymore. 

When he did speak, it was in a rush. As if he could keep me from understanding the words.  
“Embry had a crush on you when we were kids.”

All I could do was repeat, “What?” Quil’s words reverberated in my ears. How had I never heard about this before? For years I had considered Embry my best friend, yet such an important detail had never been revealed.

Quil looked like he would have rather been anywhere else in the world than right in front of me in that moment. He cowered into the couch to get further away from me. Claire had pushed her keyboard to the side, and she crawled up onto the couch next to Quil, putting a hand to his arm like she didn’t know what else to do.

“Embry had a crush on you when we were kids,” Quil repeated. This time the words were said at a normal speed, but I could hear a quiver in Quil’s voice as he worried about what he had done. His eyes stayed trained on me, watching every move I made. It looked as if he was scared I would run after hearing something like this, and I wasn’t sure how that made me feel.

I wasn’t even sure how I felt about the words themselves. This wasn’t a bad secret by any stretch of the imagination. I could understand why it would have taken Embry a long time to tell me. That was why I wasn’t sure if I was angry or not. What I did know was that I was perplexed and thrown off track.

“You were always over at Jake’s,” Quil continued, knowing that the whole story would come out eventually and that there was no point in trying to conceal it any longer. Part of me thought I should stop him to get the story from Embry himself later on, but I didn’t. I was too curious to hear it. “But whenever you were over, you stayed locked away in Rachel and Rebecca’s room. We bothered you guys because we thought it was hilarious to torment Embry whenever he was in front of you. We were trying to annoy him more than you guys.”

Suddenly, I had a flash of a memory from years ago. I was sitting beside Rachel on her twin bed with Rebecca across from us on her own. Rebecca was going on about how Jacob and his friends always seemed to be at their most annoying whenever I was over.

I had thought nothing of it at the time, but there it was, pulled into my consciousness years after it had happened.

“You tormented him about me? When I was around?” I asked. I’d never suspected Embry of having a crush on me then. I’d never noticed him acting strange in my presence. In those years, he’d gone quiet, which had been a bit of a contrast to when he was younger and I had been dragged to the store and forced to spend time with him. I had noticed that, but I’d never attributed the change to anything other than puberty. Kids changed as they got older.

“Depends on how you define ‘torment’. We never teased him in front of you. We didn’t have to. We thought it was hilarious enough when he would get flustered around you and not know what to do.”

All of which sounded like things that I had attributed to Embry’s personality, not a crush. I wasn’t sure if I’d given him enough time of day to consider the possibility of him liking me. 

“How long?” I asked, the words feeling hard to get out.

Quil almost answered, but then he hesitated, looking like he was yet again regretting having brought this up.

“Maybe you should wait and talk to Embry about this yourself. That might be better.”

“Quil-” I cut myself off from protesting. I knew Quil was right. I’d had the thought myself already, but Embry wasn’t there. Embry was all the way in Port Angeles where I couldn’t get to him, and I felt an urgent need to receive answers. “Please just tell me when he started liking me. How old was he?”

That wasn’t much information, but I felt like I had to know something more before I let Quil drop the subject.

“Like, five. Maybe.” He tapped his fingers against his knee as he tried to think back, but he seemed to be having difficulty. “To tell the truth, I don’t know. For as long as I can remember it’s been a thing.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. Because Quil had known Embry for a long time. His memories of Embry should have stretched back as far as he had memories. That would have meant...Well, that was even more than I had thought I needed to prepare myself for.

But that might not have been what Quil was saying. Maybe the memories of when the crush developed hadn’t stuck around in his brain. That didn’t mean the crush had been there in the earlier years. Quil just didn’t have a clear memory about when he had first learned of it. Over time, it had become a thing that Quil thought defined their entire childhood.

That belief was easier to handle, so I would choose to believe it until I was told differently.

It was hard to keep my word and not press Quil for more information. He went to the kitchen with the task of getting Claire a glass of juice that she hadn’t asked for. The seven-year-old went along with it, sensing that Quil wanted her to. Only recently had she begun to respond to Quil’s wants the same way he had responded to hers since the imprint. She’d always gotten him in a strange way considering her young age, but now there was more evidence of it. She followed him right into the kitchen, acting as if she had requested a drink.

I took the time they were gone to try clearing my head, but the only thing I could focus on were memories. Ones that I hadn’t recalled in years. My mind tried with great difficulty to piece the story together, to take what it had known and figure out Embry’s crush for itself. But it couldn’t. Try as I might, my own memories didn’t reveal anything new. Yes, I remembered Embry becoming bashful around me, but it was the only version of Embry my memories had from that age. That had been how Embry Call acted, and I was struggling with the realization that I might have been the only person to elicit that behavior from him.

Quil and Claire came back, Claire clutching a sippy cup in her hands and dutifully taking a sip once she had sat back down on the couch. Quil watched me with trepidation as he retook his seat.

I’d pulled my phone out of my pocket under the pretense of checking the time. There were hours until Embry would be back. I’d known that before I looked, but the time was only part of the real reason why I was holding it. So much of me was tempted to send Embry a message. The problem was that I didn’t have a clue what to say in it. Everything I could think of was better said in person than through a phone. I didn’t want to alarm him while he was in class. That was a surefire way to make things worse than they were.

Noise startled my thoughts away from the phone I had taken to staring at. I glanced up to find that Quil had turned the volume up on the television. Some cartoon played on the screen. The kind meant for the really little kids where all the characters talked too slowly for any adult to stand. Even I knew Claire had outgrown this level of programming. Quil flipped up a couple of channels to another cartoon, and from the look on his face, he enjoyed this show as much as Claire did.

At least the characters talked at a normal speed, I thought as I resigned myself to watching it.

And watching it and watching it. That’s what it felt like after the fifth episode. I hadn’t realized at the beginning that I was getting myself into a marathon. After two episodes, I’d almost gotten up and left, but I reminded myself that I would feel restless at home too.

I needed to see Embry as soon as I could, so I would stay put.

Embry showed up two episodes after I’d memorized the theme song. He entered the apartment as if it was any other day, not looking surprised to see me there. Claire greeted him first, babbling on about what had happened to her that day, and Embry listened while managing to throw me a grin every so often. I smiled back, unable to do otherwise.

“I think we need to be getting you back to Emily and Sam, Clairebear.”

Claire pouted, but she didn’t resist Quil, heading for the place by the door where her coat and shoes resided.

This was the usual time of day for Quil to take Claire back to her aunt and uncle’s, but I also knew that the action held a special significance today. Quil didn’t want to stick around for whatever he felt was about to transpire between Embry and me.

Quil helped Claire with her coat while Embry disappeared down the hall towards his bedroom. For once, I couldn’t tell if he sensed that something was off. When the door closed behind Quil and Claire, I could hear Embry dropping his backpack onto the floor. He reappeared in the living room a few minutes later.

I didn’t say anything as he settled down next to me on the couch. Embry closed his eyes and leaned his head against the backrest. It only took a minute for him to realize that something was off from the way I hadn’t moved or said anything. I watched one of his eyes crack open to look at me, and I didn’t respond, still trying to figure out how to bring it up without making him feel humiliated.

Opening both eyes, Embry lifted his head to look at me, brow furrowed.

“What’s up?” he asked. I felt his hand come to rest on my thigh in a comforting gesture.

With a sigh, I readjusted myself on the couch to be better able look at him as we talked. I never felt like I was talking to Embry unless I could see his facial expressions. It was often the only way to understand what he meant.

“Quil said some things he might regret today.”

My heartbeat sped up in worry over Embry’s response, but in reality, the statement hadn’t been enough for him to get what I was talking about. I watched as he became confused as to why that would be significant.

“Quil always says things he should regret,” Embry said, and that much was true. I would agree. Quil had never learned when to keep his mouth shut.

“This time I think he’s worried that you’ll be mad at him though.”

There was still confusion on Embry’s face, but there was a glimmer of something that might have been recognition as well. It was as if the right possibility had occurred to him, but he wasn’t sure if he’d stumbled upon the truth.

“Why would that be exactly?” he asked, sounding more cautious than before.

I sighed, reaching out to place a hand on Embry’s chest. My hope was that it would help comfort him when I said it. I wasn’t sure how embarrassed he would feel, but judging by Quil’s initial response, discussing Embry’s childhood feelings for me had been declared off limits. Embry hadn’t wanted me to know.

“He made a comment about feelings for me that you may or may not have had much longer than I’d thought you had.”

Wanting to see each emotion and thought that flashed in his eyes, I watched him. Embry, being Embry, managed not to reveal as much as I would have thought. He looked in control of his expression, and I wondered if I’d overestimated how embarrassed he would be about having been found out.

The hand that had rested on my thigh moved, and Embry instead repositioned himself so that his body was turned towards me on the couch. The same hand found my hand instead, lacing our fingers together.

“I’m going to kill him tomorrow,” Embry replied in a joking tone.

I grinned at him. “Can you at least explain it to me before you wind up behind bars?”

Embry nodded, his eyes glancing away and showing what I thought was a hint of nervousness for the first time. His hand that wasn’t holding mine twitched, and I knew then that I’d been right that he hadn’t wanted me to know.

“What did Quil give away exactly?”

“Not that much,” I assured him. “Once he realized that he’d said something he shouldn’t have said, it was hard to get him to talk.”

“Good,” Embry shot back. This time he sounded more serious than he had before.

“Why didn’t you want me to know?” I asked, eager to know the answer to that question more than I was the facts of the past.

Embry shrugged, taking a deep breath as he looked me in the eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to be some huge secret that I kept from you, not once you knew I had feelings for you anyway. It’s not like I was worried about you knowing. It was more like I was scared to explain and lay it all out for you how embarrassing I was in the past.”

“I don’t know if you can consider your past self embarrassing when I never managed to figure out that you had a crush, sweetheart.” Embry poked me in the side over the sarcastically used endearment. “Really though,” I continued on in seriousness, “I never knew. That’s way more than can be said for most childhood crushes. It’s actually impressive. How the hell did you manage that?”

Embry shrugged. He wasn’t acting like he was eager to share the information with me, but he also didn’t hold back. “Whenever you were around, I was too nervous to do much of anything. I froze up. So maybe I couldn’t embarrass myself in other ways, but I feel like I was obvious. Even then I thought I was obvious.”

“Maybe I’m the one who should be embarrassed. If I didn’t realize.”

Embry shook his head, not wanting to hear me joke about it. “Even then I knew why you didn’t. I was four years younger, Leah. When you were a freshman, I was in elementary school. It wasn’t like I stood a chance.”

“When did you start to like me then? Because Quil never said. All I know is that you were young. I can remember, now, when I used to go over to see Rachel and Rebecca, and you, Jake, and Quil would be there. I can remember it, but I was always going over there. A lot of my childhood happened at their house, and I can’t figure out when you started acting shy around me.”

Embry smiled, apparently at some memory he was recalling in his mind. “Before either one of us was going over to the Blacks’ I think. It was back when you came to the store sometimes. Even then I got that you played with me because Sue told you too, but I didn’t care because it meant that you paid attention to me. I looked forward to those visits. I didn’t realize it until later, but I think my mom knew that too. I think she invited Sue to talk sometimes just because she knew that seeing you would make me happy.”

“You can’t be serious,” I exclaimed. My mouth had dropped open as I listened to Embry speak. I’d been banking on the slight change in demeanor around me to be the differentiation I needed between the Embry who had had a crush on me and the one who didn’t. I hadn’t believed that, even when he’d been little more than a toddler, he had liked me like that.

“It wasn’t like later,” Embry insisted. “I didn’t have a crush on you then per se. Do three-year-olds even know what crushes are? I just thought you were this pretty girl who was nice to me, and I liked that. Maybe saying I admired you would be better.”

“Then when did you get a crush on me?”

Embry was growing bolder, maybe spurred on by my reaction so far. He leaned back into the couch, and I mirrored him, waiting for him to say more.

“Maybe fourth grade,” he admitted. “I don’t know if I could pinpoint the date, but fourth grade sounds right. I never stopped looking up to you from when I was little, really, but you stopped coming around the store, which meant I stopped giving you much thought.”

“Thanks,” I interjected, making a smile appear on Embry’s face.

He shrugged it off by saying, “Out of sight, out of mind, you know?”

“Right.” I pinched him in the side, causing him to squirm away and snatch up what had previously been my free hand.

Cupping both of my hands in his own, he continued, “Anyway, it was around fourth grade, and the three of us were starting to understand why people went on dates and kissed. I think we all had our first major crushes that year now that I think about it. That was also around the same time our parents started giving us more independence. We got to go over to each other’s houses after school instead of going straight home most days, and we took advantage of it.

“We wound up at Jake’s house way more often than mine or Quil’s because Rachel and Rebecca would walk us there after school and babysit us. Not that we called it babysitting at the time. We swore that we didn’t need to be watched.”

I listened as if Embry was reciting Shakespeare to me. So far, this recount of the past wasn’t surprising. It was information that I either knew or could have guessed, but I hung on Embry’s every word, wanting to know what would come next.

“You know most of this because you were there all the time too,” Embry admitted. “But being around you every day… I don’t know. I developed a crush eventually. A crush that lasted a lot longer than any of Jake’s or Quil’s crushes. I think that’s why they liked to tease me about it so much. We knew it was doomed-”

“Doomed,” I said. “Thanks for the compliment.”

Embry’s thumb ran over the skin on the back of my hand.

“You were fourteen, and I was ten. I think ‘doomed’ is the perfect word to describe it. Even then I knew it. Not that it stopped me from dreaming.

“Jake and Quil put up with it for years. I don’t know if ‘put up with’ would be accurate. I never talked about it, but a few years passed. You started dating Sam. Quil and Jake both dated girls, although ‘dated’ might not be the word I would use for it these days. I didn’t do any of that though. I was too caught up on you, but by then everyone thought you and Sam would wind up married, and Jake and Quil started bothering me about not getting over you.

“Eventually, I ‘dated’,” he pulled out air quotes for the word, “this girl in our class. She was nice. It took a while, but I managed to get over you. At least I thought I did.”

My breath caught in my throat as I listened. I could feel excitement causing my stomach to tighten.

“Then I phased.” We were reaching the part of the story that I’d already been told. “Sam was still reeling from the aftermath of your breakup, and when I saw his thoughts, I felt angry about the whole thing. I didn’t get why at first, but I couldn’t control my thoughts back then like I can now. The guys caught on, and they took to teasing me. The whole thing brought my feelings back to me like they’d never left despite me being sure that they had.”

Tears stung at my eyes no matter how much I attempted to blink them away. Part of me couldn’t forget my heartbroken self from back when I’d first phased. I’d been convinced back then that I would never love anyone the way I had loved Sam, and that had terrified me.

When the realization hit me, it hit me hard. I was in love with Embry. That was what had me like this. This story wouldn’t have affected me as much if that simple fact weren’t true. I had been convinced after Sam that I would never love again, a combination of dejection and a stubborn refusal to put myself through heartbreak again. Despite thinking I’d moved past that ages ago, a small part of myself had continued to think that way, and that, perhaps, was why I’d been oblivious to how strong my feelings for Embry had become.

I wiped a hand across my eyes and tried to not look panicked. Telling him wasn’t an option. I knew I would have to someday. There was no other option in the long run, but it was also something I wanted to deal with in time.

For now, I would keep it locked inside like a secret. I couldn’t tell if I was motivated by nothing but fear or if I was making a smart move by letting myself adjust to the truth before sharing it.

Instead of saying the words, I lifted myself up from where I was sitting and maneuvered myself onto Embry’s lap. Our faces were inches apart, and I leaned in to drop a kiss on his lips, causing him to grin as I pulled away.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked. It was the one question that remained for me. “I already knew you used to have a crush on me. Why not tell me the whole story?”

Embry shrugged, casting his eyes downward until I lifted his chin and made him look me in the eyes.

“It felt strange to bring it up,” he admitted. “I didn’t know how to go, ‘Just so you know, I liked you for years as a kid,’ one day while we were talking. I guess part of me was worried that you’d be put off by it.”

“Why though? We’re together. I like you. I like you too much honestly, so why were you worried that I would care?”

“Leah, I know you think that I overthink things all the time, and maybe you think that means that everything I do is rational, but it’s not. I don’t know what my answer would be other than that it was embarrassing to have to the say the words.”

“You’ve managed pretty well today,” I told him, poking him in the cheek and causing him to grin.

“I guess. I’ll admit it was easier than I thought it would be.”

“I’m still here and everything.”

“A miracle,” Embry whispered, and it was too close to sounding reverent instead of a joke that I leaned in to kiss him and shut him up. Embry kissed back, and soon, we lost ourselves in it. For a while at least, all I did was feel and words such as ‘love’ didn’t matter.

**February 26th, 2010**

“Ness, at some point you have to eat or drink or something.”

I watched the girl as she sat, pouting, at the kitchen table. Jake sighed, his frustration growing the longer she resisted. Not much could have aggravated Jake when we were talking about Nessie, but Nessie’s attempts not to eat or drink anything had achieved it. I could tell from the way Jake twitched that he was terrified of Nessie starving herself because she didn’t want to eat one meal. When it came to their imprints, wolves always jumped to the worst possible scenario each time they perceived danger.

Jake was no better.

“Leaver her alone, Jake. She’s not going to eat it,” I snapped.

He glared at me, and it was almost a look that could have led to a confrontation if I allowed it to grow. Instead, I rolled my eyes.

“She needs to eat, Leah,” Jake spat out at me. This wasn’t usual behavior for him, but I knew it was usual wolf behavior when they worried about an imprint.

“It’s one meal. She’ll be fine. Kids do this all the time. It’s like a right of passage. If she didn’t try to go one night without eating, then she wouldn’t be a real kid.”

Jake didn’t agree with my line of reasoning, even going as far as to growl low in his throat when I insinuated that Nessie could be anything other than a ‘real kid’. He had always been touchy about her being seen as different, though he tried to conceal it. On one hand, she should be regarded as special in every way. On another, Jake held a strong sensitivity to Nessie’s differences being pointed out as strange.

Nessie watched our exchange, not taking her eyes off of us, but she did so while also looking detached from the events in front of her. She wasn’t interested in contributing to the conversation. She hadn’t said that many words since I’d shown up at Jake’s apartment and found him having this battle with her.

“Nessie,” Jake began again, but this time, Nessie cut him off with a sharp, “No.”

Jake and I both looked at her in surprise. I could tell that Jake was as shocked as I was that she had been short with him. Never before had I seen her take that tone with anyone, let alone Jake. Looking at her, I could see how set in her actions she was. Jake was never going to get her to eat the food that sat in front of her. There was no way it was happening. Nessie’s arms were crossed against her chest, and she frowned down at the wood of the table, looking guilty for being harsh but not looking any more likely to eat than she had been before.

“Remind me again what’s going on,” I prompted.

“I told you,” Jake began, taking his frustration out on me instead of his imprint. “Carlisle and Esme are gone.”

“I know that,” I retorted with a roll of my eyes. “Everyone knows that, but why, exactly, has that led to you not eating, Ness?”

She glanced up at me with a sad look in her eye. “I don’t feel like eating.” The words were nothing more than a whisper. “I just don’t want to.”

Jake shot me an exasperated look. One that seemed to say ‘do you see what I’m dealing with?’ and act as a way of looking for me to sympathize with him, to tell Nessie that she needed to eat her dinner.

Instead, I shrugged. Leaning my chair back onto its rear legs, I observed Nessie closely.

“She’s not going to eat it, Jake. You heard her. She doesn’t feel like eating.”

“Leah.” Each time he said my name, it became more likely that he was going to fight me. Nessie might have been the one thing holding him back. “It’s dinner. It’s an important meal. She hasn’t had any blood either. She has to eat something. It’s not healthy-”

“It’s one meal, Jake.” He had to have heard that a million times at this point, and I knew as I said it that he wasn’t going to take me seriously.

He began rambling to himself about bullshit. “She skips one meal at first. Then she skips another. What does it say to her if I let her not eat? How would Bella and Edward feel when I bring back a starving child-”

“That’s an exaggeration.” So much so that I couldn’t take him seriously anymore either.

“I’m not setting a precedent for unhealthy eating. She’s growing. She needs nutrients if she-”

“Can you stop talking about me like I’m not here? Thanks.”

Jacob and I both stared at Nessie with wide eyes. It was the only time in my life that I’d heard Nessie Cullen sound...bitter. It wasn’t a good look on her, and she’d realized it too. She looked like she regretted the comment itself, but she didn’t backtrack as she continued talking.

“I know eating’s important,” she told Jake. I could tell that she was trying to make herself sound as mature as possible. “But not eating once won’t kill me. I could not eat for a while and still live, like in the stories about when Grandpa Carlisle first transformed, but I’m not going to try that, Jacob. I just don’t want to eat tonight. Please?”

Jake did nothing but blink at her for several seconds. He appeared taken aback that Nessie was not only defying him but was arguing against him. This was new. Nessie has always been an agreeable child, willing to do anything asked of her. Never before had I seen her refuse to do something she was told to do, let alone speak out against it. Jake hadn’t either, and the moment had thrown him off so much that he no longer knew what to do.

Eventually, he snapped out of his shock. Clearing his throat, he said, “Fine. But just this one night. Promise me you’ll eat breakfast tomorrow with your parents.”

“I promise,” she told him with as bright of a smile as she could manage. As soon as her eyes fell back on the plate in front of her, the smile dropped. Not only that but her entire body sagged. Watching her was enough to make anyone feel somber. She looked like a child who was dealing with death or something equally terrible, not someone whose grandparents had moved away.

But, I reminded myself, Nessie had yet to deal with any greater tragedy than something like this, and it was doubtful that she ever would get much experience with tragedy. Unless, of course, the Volturi did attack the Cullens someday. If they didn’t, Nessie could live for an eternity without losing anyone truly important to her besides her maternal grandfather. I felt a surge of jealousy at the thought.

Knowing that she was no longer going to be scolded, Nessie rose from the table and headed for the living room, not bothering to clean and rinse her plate. Another unusual behavior that I’d observed in her tonight. She was always polite to the point of cleaning off her own dishes without being prompted.

Jake didn’t react at first. He watched Nessie leave the room and then turned to glare down at her uneaten food. His brow was furrowed as he sat there and worried.

“She’ll be fine,” I repeated for what felt like the millionth time. I shouldn’t have needed to say it in the first place. “She’s part vamp, Jake. It’s not like it would be easy for her to die.”

He jumped when he heard the word ‘die’ as if it had sent an electric shock throughout his body, but it also seemed to wake him up to the fact that he was glaring at a plate. He picked up said plate and carried it over to the counter, depositing the food Nessie hadn’t eaten into some containers so it could be put in the fridge.

“It’s not like I think it will kill her,” he said unconvincingly. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want her to eat a meal.”

“Well, no,” I conceded. “You should be encouraging proper nutrition or whatever, but you’re going overboard, Jake. Acting like skipping one meal is this irreversible sin or something. She’ll start feeling hungry in a few hours and ask for something. Even if she doesn’t, she’ll eat eventually. One skipped meal isn’t something to get worked up over.”

Jake sighed, and though he had his back turned to me as he placed the leftovers in the fridge, I could tell that his shoulders were tense.

“It’s not just the food,” he admitted. His eyes flickered towards the living room door, no doubt worried that Nessie would overhear what he was about to admit to me. “It’s more than that. Every time a couple of them move away, she does something like this, and it’s gotten worse each time. She’s never refused to eat before.”

“She’ll get over it, and it’s not like there will be a next time. Bella and Edward are the only ones left. I assume they’re not leaving.”

“Not anytime soon,” Jake said with a shake of his head. “I’ve talked about it with Bella. They’ll stay until Nessie’s full grown, and if Nahuel’s experience turns out to be usual for a half vampire, then we have another three years before it would become a possibility.”

“By then she’ll be older, better able to take it.”

Jake pulled out his chair too roughly, making it scrape across the floor. He rubbed his temples as if his head was beginning to ache.

“She’ll be seven,” he stated. “I don’t care whether she’ll look like an adult or not, Leah. She’ll have been alive for seven years, and I don’t think she’ll be able to take it better than she’s taken everything else. She looks ten or eleven now, but she still does stuff all the time that reminds me that she’s not. She’s only four.”

I knew what Jake was talking about. Sometimes, Nessie’s maturity amazed me, even taking into account the fact that she looked like a preteen. At other times, a naivety came through that provided a hint that she was actually much younger. This always seemed to be especially true when it came to larger issues, like her family moving away or other people making decisions that she couldn’t understand. Nessie had yet to learn how to put herself in someone else’s shoes to view the world their way. Maybe she hadn’t realized that she needed to do so. She never understood reasoning that wasn’t the same as her own.

“Every kid gets upset, Jake. It would be worrying if she didn’t. You can’t baby her for the rest of her life. Let her wallow in her pain and sadness for one night.”

Jake rubbed his hand over his eyes one more time before sighing. “You’re right,” he allowed. “Maybe I’m too wound up. It won’t be as bad in the morning. For any of us.”

I nodded, going along with it.

When the next day came around, Nessie went home before I saw her, leaving me unsure if she had felt better or not. All I knew was that, when Jake showed up for patrol two days later, it was still the only thing he wanted to think about.


	3. March

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Once again, thank you to KBelle1 and TheEagerScribbler (both FFnet usernames) for beta reading this chapter.

**March 18th, 2010**

The phone rang from its place across the room, and I groaned. The workday had felt long, and now that I was home, all I wanted to do was rest. Just the walk to the other side of the room felt too long.

But if I didn’t pick it up, the obnoxious noise would keep going. I took the five steps to the dresser, snatching up the phone. Seeing Nessie’s name on the screen, I muttered a few choice words under my breath.

Nessie had gotten a phone a few weeks ago, and while she had excitedly given me her number, this was only the second time she’d used it to contact me. Last time it had been a request for me to pick her up and bring her to La Push. I didn’t want to know what she wanted this time.

“Leah,” Nessie said as soon as I had clicked to answer the call. There was a note of desperation in her voice that I picked up on with that one word. I could feel a shiver of dread go down my spine.

“Yeah?” I asked. It was a struggle not to pull the phone away from my ear in an attempt to not hear what Nessie wanted to tell me.

Of course, I did hear. There was no way not too, and the increased certainty that Nessie was crying on the other end of the line only made the situation worse.

“Can you come get me?” she asked, sniffling. “I don’t want to be at home right now, and Jacob’s working. I don’t want to call him and make him come get me.”

He would if she called. He’d done it before, and I knew that Nessie had felt so guilty that she hadn’t done it since. Instead, she’d taken to calling me or one of the guys as a backup plan.

“Yeah, I’ll come,” I assured her. I brushed off her thank you, sighing as I hung up the phone. I stood up with a groan, dialing another number as I worked on putting on my shoes.

“Hello?” Embry’s voice could be heard through the phone as I began hopping around on one foot, trying to slip my shoe on while the phone rested between my ear and shoulder.

“Change of plans,” I told her him, annoyance seeping through my voice. I didn’t feel a need to disguise it with Embry like I had Nessie. “Don’t come over. Nessie called. In Tears. I’m going to the Cullens. I’ll call you when I get back to the house.”

Embry sighed. “What’s wrong this time?”

I wasn’t sure when Nessie being in a bad mood had become expected instead of an anomaly.

“I don’t know,” I grumbled. “Not like I was going to ask and risk her telling me everything without letting me hang up the phone.”

Grabbing my car keys, I hurried through the house and out to my car. I would have preferred running. It’s how I got everywhere unless I had a good reason for why I couldn’t. Nessie’s current state was one of those reasons. I knew she wouldn’t want to run while she was upset. She was the type who preferred to sit and wallow in self pity.

“Come by here,” Embry offered. “I’ll go with you. Deal with Bella and Edward if they’re annoying, talk to Nessie about her feelings, whatever else you don’t want to do.”

I hadn’t realized that I wanted Embry to do just that until he’d made the offer.

“Thank you,” I said with a sigh of relief. “I don’t think I’m in the mood to listen to any of them after working all day.”

Not that Embry would have been in any better of a mood after sitting in class all day. He should have been as tired as I was, if not more so after making the run to and from Port Angeles today.

“You’re welcome,” he responded, and somehow, he didn’t sound upset or tired about it. He would be much better at dealing with Nessie than I was.

That became even more apparent when I arrived at his apartment and he got in the car with a smile on his face that hardly appeared tired. His happiness made me pout, and Embry grinned in amusement as he leaned in to give me a brief kiss.

“Let’s get this over with,” I complained, putting the car in reverse and backing out of the driveway.

“So, she didn’t tell you anything?” Embry questioned, looking out at the trees that flashed by along the side of the road.

“Just that she didn’t want to stay at home,” I said. “Like I told you, I didn’t ask more than that. I’m sure we’ll get the whole story later. From Jake if Nessie doesn’t want to talk to us.”

“You told him yet?” Embry asked.

“No, when would I have had time?” I shot Embry a look out of the corner of my eye, and he shrugged, not trying to argue. “I figured I’d call him once he got off work. You know as well as I do that he’d leave and go get her himself otherwise. Nessie called me for a reason.”

Embry nodded. “Right, right. I agree, but he’s going to be angry when he realizes she was upset and no one told him.”

I sighed, knowing Embry was right. I’d known it from the beginning, but that didn’t meant I was going to call him. “He’ll get over it. Especially when Nessie tells him that she wanted me to come get her. He can’t stay angry with me for following his imprint’s wishes. That’s like Imprint 101.”

Embry didn’t argue with that, and soon enough, we began to smell leech from the car. I flipped the air conditioning off, which did little to make the smell disappear for us wolves. Scrunching my nose and bearing it, I drove up to the familiar house.

Nessie sat on the front porch steps, watching us drive up with a detached look on her face. Edward stood behind her, close to the door of the house. It looked as if he’d been rebuffed and begun to guard her from afar. Nessie stood up before I’d put the car in park. She offered a halfhearted wave in Edward’s direction but didn’t glance back at him.

I looked at Embry, silently asking if we should say anything to Edward before we took his daughter and left. Embry shrugged while Nessie opened the car door and slid in behind him, buckling her seatbelt without looking up at us either. I glanced back at the porch. Edward stood in the same spot, looking at me instead of Nessie. He offered a slight nod and turned to walk back in the house as if he was handing over Nessie’s protection to me or something.

With a sigh, I turned around to look at Nessie, unnerved with the level of quiet we’d encountered at the Cullen house. She had settled into her seat, a bag clutched close to her side. Her eyes were on me, but there was a faraway quality to them that unnerved me, like she was begging me to drive and not make her talk.

So that’s what I did, turning around and putting the car in drive instead of asking any questions. Embry, on the other hand, wasn’t as eager to led Nessie wallow. Just as we had turned back onto the main road towards La Push, he turned around in his seat to get a better look at the half vampire.

“What’s up?” he asked. He phrased it casually, as if that would make it easier for Nessie to answer. Instead, when I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw her shoulders sag as if Embry had defeated her when he began trying to get her to talk.

There was a long stretch of silence, and despite Nessie’s obedient nature, I thought there was a good chance that she would refuse to speak. She certainly seemed to be debating the same thing with herself, but eventually, it seemed, she couldn’t help but answer.

“Aunt Rosalie called this morning. She said she had something important to talk about with me.”

Nessie sighed as if she couldn’t bear to go on with the story. When dealing with human kids her age, I would have prepared myself for something overdramatic, something that only seemed like it was a big deal to the kid telling the story, but there was a way Nessie said it that told me this really was a difficult subject for her.

“We have a new family member,” Nessie said, almost causing me to swerve off the road in shock. I glanced at Embry to make sure I wasn’t the only one having trouble processing those words, and he was staring over his shoulder at Nessie in wide-eyed shock. He contorted himself so that he could see Nessie better, straining his neck in the process.

“Family member?” he asked, voice rising in what could only be described as something close to panic. None of the little information we had on this sounded good. I wanted to bang my head against the steering wheel as I thought about being the one responsible for passing this information onto Jake and Sam.

“Aunt Rose and Uncle Emmett heard rumors from some nomads that there was this young vampire a few towns over. A girl who didn’t look much older than me, Aunt Rose said. She felt worried, especially since the other vampires said the girl was alone and appeared to be a newborn.

“They tracked her down.” Nessie’s voice cracked as she told the story. “And found her. She woke up from her transformation alone two years ago. She was thirteen when she was bitten. Close enough to being an immortal child that Aunt Rose thinks the vampire who bit her must have thought it wasn’t safe to stay around, but the girl can’t remember anything close to the transformation.”

Nessie took a deep breath, needing to steady herself before she continued with her story. It felt like it had become more difficult, not easier, for her to speak the further into the story she got.

“Anyway,” Nessie said with a sigh. “Her name is Lauren, and Aunt Rose convinced Uncle Emmett to take her in as long as she agreed to becoming a vegetarian. She had been sticking close to her parents’ house before, not knowing where else to go but having to stay hidden from them.”

Nessie turned her face towards the window, letting her hair fall down and obscure her face.

“She needed somewhere to go,” she continued. “So it’s nice that she found our family.”

It sounded like she was parroting something that had been said to her instead of something she meant. Her voice was flat and emotionless.

I glanced over at Embry, unsure of what I could do that would break the tension in the vehicle. The drive back to La Push suddenly felt like an unending journey. Nessie, for her part, appeared willing to sit in silence in the back seat. Embry looked between me and her as if trying to decide what to do. It didn’t seem like Nessie expected us to respond to her story. She didn’t look at either of us, and her posture conveyed a closed off girl who didn’t want to talk about it. No doubt she had talked about it enough.

Jake was going to be furious. I could already see it, and considering his imprint would be at my house, I was destined to witness his reaction to learning of this new Cullen addition for himself. I knew Embry had thought the same thing because I could see the dread in his expression when I glanced over at him.

By the time we reached my house, none of us had spoken since Nessie finished her story. Nessie’s seatbelt was unbuckled before I’d put the car in park, and she bounded out of the vehicle and through the front door of the house as soon as the car had stopped. Embry and I remained behind, watching her disappear without bothering to unbuckle our seatbelts.

“How am I both shocked and not surprised?” Embry asked, keeping his voice low out of hope that Nessie wouldn’t hear what was being discussed between us.

I could hear voices in the house that I knew belonged to Seth and Al. They seemed to be talking to Nessie, but she didn’t say anything in response that I could catch from the car.

“I never liked Rosalie,” I reminded Embry. “I mean, I never liked any of the vampires, but I always disliked her especially.”

“Can you fault her for wanting a kid? Especially after watching Bella get to be both a vampire and a mother. That has to be hard. I remember the way she used to watch Ness. She wanted this badly.”

I didn’t care for Embry’s justifications of Rosalie’s actions. “She has an eternity to find a kid. Why’d she have to do it when Nessie is still torn up about them leaving?”

“I don’t think she planned it,” Embry pointed out. “It just happened.”

“Just happened my ass. They went looking for the vampire girl, and it’s not like she would be the only one they ever managed to find if they tried.”

“It’s not like this is her replacing Nessie.”

“See. You and I can get that, but I don’t think Nessie can. And that would be the problem. A problem that I don’t think Rosalie Hale, self-absorbed vampire of the century, grasped when she decided to become someone’s vampire fairy godmother.”

I unbuckled my seatbelt with a click, shoving open the door and heading inside. Truthfully, I was more frustrated with Rosalie because her actions had thrust an upset child on me than I was frustrated with her life choices. Those didn’t matter to me. I knew that even as I ranted to Embry, but I didn’t need to tell him that.

Embry was close behind me when I entered the house. Nessie had taken a seat in an armchair, book already open and held in front of her face as if she were blocking out the rest of the world. I could read The Secret Garden across the front cover in a fancy font.

Seth and Al were also there as I had expected. They were sitting side-by-side on the couch, and they both glanced over at Embry and me with raised eyebrows when we entered. I shook my head to signal that it was best we didn’t answer their questions at the moment. They both looked back at Nessie, still in confusion, as if they were trying to work it out for themselves.

“Nessie,” I asked, taking a seat in the armchair across from her, “do you know when Jake gets off work today?”

It was always around the same time, so I had an idea. But he would want to know about this as soon as possible, and Nessie was guaranteed to have the exact time.

“Six,” she told me, flipping a page of her book.

Her short answer caused Seth’s and Al’s eyes to widen further, and they glanced at each other and then at me and Embry once more.

I glanced over at the clock as Embry took up the remaining space on the couch. It was five thirty, so there wasn’t much time. I took my phone out of my pocket and began fiddling with it in my hand, tempted to call Jake right then and get it over with.

“Whatcha reading?” Al asked Nessie out of the blue. He leaned over the armrest of the couch to get a better look at her book, and surprisingly to me at least, Nessie turned the book around so that he could see it.

“The Secret Garden,” Nessie explained. “It’s about this orphan girl who goes to live with her uncle in England and discovers a secret garden hidden at the house.”

Al nodded along with her quick summary. “I think I’ve heard of it,” he responded, and I wasn’t sure if it was the truth or not.

“I hated that movie,” Seth complained, tilting his head back on the couch and groaning.

Watching Nessie’s face, I could see that she didn’t take well to Seth’s quick dismissal of the movie’s merits.

“Which version?” she asked. “The BBC miniseries? The 1993 one? Was it the Hallmark version?”

Seth’s head shot up in a moment of panic. “I-I don’t know,” he admitted. He glanced around at us as if we’d be able to help, but not even I knew which adaptation Seth had seen. I could tell from his expression that Nessie’s quick-fire list had confused him.

“The 1987 one is the best,” Nessie said. Her voice was at least animated for the first time since we’d picked her up. “That can’t have been the one you watched. You’d have liked it then.”

Seth hesitated. I could tell from the look on his face that he had no intention of watching the movie, but he’d seen what Nessie had looked like when she came in and the fact that she looked even remotely happy now had made him reluctant to say so.

“I’ll have to check it out,” he lied, and Al tried to stifle his laughter, prompting Seth to shove him away. Al didn’t react except to reclaim his place at Seth’s side.

If Nessie thought anything of Al’s laugh, she didn’t show it. She had gone back to her book, eyes traveling steadily across the page as she read. Whether or not anyone in the room was laughing seemed to be the last thing she cared about.

I watched as she pulled her knees towards her chest, the book leaning against her thighs. She looked like she was curling into a ball. I sighed, and Embry reached out to take my hand in his, letting them hang over the space between my chair and the end of the couch where he sat.

Everything was quiet for what felt like ages after that. The only thing breaking the silence was the whispers of Seth and Al, talking about something I hadn’t bothered to listen to, and Nessie turning the pages of her book. I continued to fiddle with the phone in my hand, lighting it up time and time again to watch the clock change.

Three minutes before six I lost my patience and stood up, moving toward the kitchen to talk to Jake in an illusion of privacy. Embry shattered that illusion when he got up and followed me.

I heard Seth and Al’s whispering die down as I dialed the phone number, and I knew that they were listening in as intently as Embry was even if they had remained in the other room. Even the sound of the pages of Nessie’s book turning had stopped as I waited for Jake to pick up.

“Hello?” Jake answered, a question in his tone. No doubt he had no clue why I would call him immediately as he got off work unless it were important. I tapped my fingers against the kitchen counter that I had leaned on at some point. “Leah?” Jake continued when I didn’t answer him. “Do you need something?”

“Uh, yeah,” I managed to get out while still debating with myself over how I should handle this conversation. Something I should have decided on during the wait. “I have your imprint at my house.”

“Oh.” There was a pause as Jake tried to remember if there was a reason for that. “Why, exactly, is Nessie at your house?”

“I think it would be better for her to explain that to you when you get here.”

There was a moment of hesitation where I could tell that Jake was fighting the urge to demand more information. Then, there was a sigh, and Jake said, “Right. Okay. I’ll be there in a second.”

He might have literally meant a second for all I knew. I wouldn’t have put it past him. Not when I could hear the strain in his voice. He would have been worried about this no matter what recent events had transpired, but I also knew that Nessie’s moodiness had him more concerned than he would have been in the past.

He hung up the phone without a goodbye, and I rolled my eyes as the line disconnected. 

“He’s on his way,” I told Embry, who had a concerned downturn to his lips as he watched me. He would have heard everything Jake had said.

I brushed past him and back into the living room. Seth and Al didn’t bother to pretend like they hadn’t been snooping. Their eyes were on the kitchen doorway when we entered the room, and they didn’t look away. Seth went as far as raising his eyebrow in another silent question. I shrugged. Jake would be here soon and would need the whole story. Seth could wait until then. I was more concerned about Nessie, who had overheard the phone conversation as well, but she wasn’t as eager to look at me. Her eyes stared at her book, but they weren’t moving across the page like they had been earlier.

Jacob was at the door by the time I had settled into my seat, and Seth managed to get up and let him in before I could put much thought into it. Jake rushed passed Seth, not paying him any attention.

Nessie had given up all pretense of reading her book, dropping it down into her lap to look up at Jacob. She appeared close to tears for the first time since I’d picked her up. Like being in proximity to Jake was the only thing she’d needed to let out the negative emotions that had been building up inside of her that day.

Part of my brain thought that I should get up to give them privacy, but another part knew that Jake would want us to hear his opinion. Getting up would only mean being summoned later, so I stayed put.

“Nessie, what’s wrong?” Jake asked, voice softening from the panicked tone he had used over the phone. He kneeled down in front of her, and I could see Nessie squirm as she confronted the story for a second time.

“Aunt Rosalie and Uncle Emmett took in a new vampire. She’s thirteen, and her name is Lauren. She was abandoned by the vampire who created her, so now she’s part of our family.”

Jake’s back was turned to me as he faced Nessie, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face. I did see his shoulders stiffen, though, as he looked at Nessie for a long moment, not saying a word. Nessie cast her eyes downward towards the book in her lap, flipping the corners of the pages in her hands to provide a distraction.

My eyes glanced over at Seth and Al to see them staring at Nessie with a look of worry and, perhaps, fascination as they took in what she had said. No doubt they felt as shocked by the information that there was a new Cullen as I had been. It had never been a possibility that I had considered, especially considering the treaty about not biting humans around La Push. Even though that restriction had been broken once, I hadn’t expected it to happen again, and the possibility of an already turned vampire joining their coven had been even further from my mind.

I looked over at Embry to see him watching Jake, a hint of worry in his eyes. He turned to me when he felt my eyes on him, and there was a question there, like he wondered if one of us should speak up and say something to Jake.

Before I could think of what to do next, Jake stood up, still looking down at Nessie. Her eyes followed him, watching to see what he was going to do next. Jake glanced around the room at each of us before he turned back to his imprint. Then he turned around to face the rest of us, indecisive about what to do or say.

“Fuck,” he groaned, causing Nessie to cringe from her chair. She never liked when anyone used ‘bad’ language around her, but she was particularly affected this time. Jake realized the same thing a moment later, apologizing to her quietly as he began to pace.

Then he kneeled back down in front of Nessie, looking over her like he was looking for injuries or as if anything might have changed in the ten seconds since he’d last been kneeling in front of her.

“Are you okay?” he asked her anxiously.

“I’m fine.”

The reply was an obvious lie. Everyone in the room knew that, but Jake’s distress was the first thing that had gotten Nessie to even attempt to appear okay. It was a marked change, like Jake had taken some of Nessie’s negative emotions and relieved her of them. Which was great except for the fact that I wished Jacob would calm down.

Jake didn’t believe her reassurance, and he continued to inspect her for any hints of the truth, causing Nessie to groan.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, this time more insistent.

Jake nodded, going along with it because he knew that it would be hopeless not too. Instead, he motioned for her to stand up.

“Come on,” he urged. “I’m going to call your mom to talk to her about it.”

Nessie went to slip her book into her bag, sling the strap over her shoulder, and stand up. Still, she wrinkled her nose when Jake mentioned calling her mother.

“Do you have to right now?” she asked, a note of desperation in her voice. “Can’t it wait? As soon as you call, she’s going to want me to come home, and I’m not ready for that yet.”

Jake sighed, but I could tell that he knew that the words Nessie spoke were true. I doubted he would call Bella.

“I’ll wait,” he said, confirming my prediction. “But not too long, okay? She’s going to want to know that you’re okay.”

Nessie nodded, although she didn’t look happy about it. I couldn’t say that I was either after the insinuation that Bella would be freaking out over Nessie’s wellbeing. What did she and Edward think I would do with their daughter? Furthermore, what did they think I would do that would result in a half vampire child actually getting hurt? Sure, I could kill vampires, but managing to physically harm Nessie on accident? That wasn’t easy. I felt offended that Bella would think I was that incapable of watching a child that so rarely caused problems.

Jake and Nessie disappeared out of the house, and as soon as the door was closed, I heard Embry’s quiet laughter. I snapped my head around to look at him and saw that he was watching me, having taken in my angry expression after Jake’s comment about Bella.

He reached out to take my hand, stroking his thumb along my skin. I let out a long breath, trying to let out some of the frustration that I knew was pointless. I shouldn’t care enough about Bella Cullen to be angry with her. It didn’t matter.

“That was interesting,” Al piped up, causing Seth to hum in agreement.

“Rosalie and Emmett really went and adopted another vampire?” Seth asked Embry and me. He was the only member of the pack that would have held any genuine interest in the topic upon hearing about it. Even Al rolled his eyes at the enthusiasm in Seth’s voice, and I was glad that Seth had waited to voice his question until after Nessie was gone. The last thing she needed to hear was that anyone could be excited about the new addition to her family. She’d heard that enough from the vamps already.

“Apparently,” Embry said. “We only got Nessie’s version of the story, but she said they heard a rumor and went and found the girl. She’s been a vampire for two years.”

Embry had his thinking voice on, which wasn’t surprising. I would have guessed that this had him thinking about something, even if I wasn’t sure what he could have gotten out of it.

“Do you think this will affect the Volturi?” Al asked. He was the only one, apparently, who had bothered to think about that little detail, although I imagined it would be the first question Sam asked as soon as someone bothered to tell him about this. “When they come for the Cullens, I mean,” Al continued. “If they’re worried about the Cullens gaining power, then adding another member to their ranks sounds stupid.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but Al had a point. I was concerned more about the frenzy such a possibility would send Sam into than I was the Volturi themselves. Embry, however, looked thoughtful, and Seth bothered to respond.

“Maybe, but she’s only thirteen, right? I don’t know if the Volturi would worry about her.”

“She was turned at thirteen,” I pointed out, unable to resist making the correction despite not wanting to talk about it as if it posed a danger. “Technically, she’d be fifteen if she hadn’t died. As it is, a vampire is a vampire. The Volturi have those creepy twins, remember? I think a vampire is a vampire to them too. Except for the immortal children, they’d consider them all the same threat regardless of age. The Cullens could use a teenaged vampire to fight like they could any other vampire.

“Not that I think the Volturi are going to attack soon,” I hurried to add, not wanting to alarm anyone to the point that they sounded the alarms of other members of the pack. “Until Alice has some change in her visions, I refuse to worry about it. We’d be stressing ourselves out over something that will likely happen centuries after our deaths.”

“I agree with Leah,” Embry said, causing Seth and Al to turn their heads towards him. “It seems illogical to view an attack by the Volturi as something that could happen in the near future. It’s self-centered, isn’t it? To think that these vampires who have lived for millennia and will live for an eternity, or who at least expect to, would bother to attack us within our lifetimes. It’s the same as the Cullens have said. It doesn’t seem like something that we should worry about.”

Seth took Embry’s words easily, nodding along in agreement. Al didn’t look as sure. His eyes were distant as he thought about the story and what the rest of us had said. He looked unsure and hesitant, not confident that he could trust our point of view.

I knew that he would be talking to some of the other wolves about this, possibly as soon as tonight. Nick, especially, would hear about it as Al’s best friend, and it wouldn’t be long before Sam caught wind and forced us into a pointless meeting. All because Al was unnecessarily worried and would need to talk about it with someone who would worry along with him.

“I’ll bring it up with Jake when he’s less caught up with his imprint,” I promised Al, hoping that such a reassurance would make him less eager to share this news with the others. At the very least, I wanted time to talk to Jake and convince him that he should talk Sam out of a meeting when the time came.

Al nodded, but I had no way of knowing whether or not my attempt had worked. I would find out for sure once I was either stuck running countless patrols or had managed to avoid it.


	4. April

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another thank you to KBelle1 and TheEagerScribbler (both FFnet usernames) for beta reading this chapter.

**April 4th, 2010**

Lauren the teenaged vampire turned out to be nothing like what I expected. 

For starters, I was shocked that she’d shown up in Forks. In the time since they had moved away, Rosalie and Emmett hadn’t come back to visit. That was in spite of Nessie’s continued sadness that they were gone. It had always appeared to me as if they either didn’t know or didn’t care.

Now that they had another family member (I couldn’t bring myself to use the word ‘daughter’) to show off, they’d come back to visit within several weeks. I wasn’t sure how Bella or Edward felt about that because they were doing an excellent job of not revealing anything. Even as I tried to analyze them from across the room, I couldn’t read their expressions.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, dragged along for a visit by Mom and Charlie. Charlie appeared nervous around the girl despite having grown used to the knowledge that the Cullens were vampires. I couldn’t fault him when I felt the same uneasiness. It was strange to look at a girl so young and know that she was dead, unaging, immortal. It was a far cry from Nessie’s existence. We’d watched her grow from the day she was born.

Not happy about this forced visit, I’d dragged Embry along with me. Although it wasn’t dragging when he wanted to come and get a firsthand look at the vampire who had managed to rock Nessie’s life. Jake hadn’t left Nessie’s side since her aunt and uncle arrived, and Seth had, of course, been dragged along as well.

Lauren wasn’t too thrilled to be sitting in a room with four wolves. She had taken a seat as far away from us as she could be while still being in the room. Every few seconds, her eyes would flicker between the four of us as if she was ready to run at a moment’s notice.

The girl’s physical presence felt as unthreatening as a vampire’s could, although I had a sneaking suspicion that this came from her aversion to us. It was clear that her own instinct was telling her to run away, and she was having to fight it. At the same time, I knew she had no desire to engage us in a fight. It wasn’t only the Cullens’ request that kept her from attacking, which made it easier to relax around her.

I could see her as little more than a thirteen-year-old girl who happened to be creepy on account of being a vampire, yet she was less of a threat to us than we were to her.

However, I didn’t think we were the ones Lauren was most intimidated by. She watched Nessie with intensity. She inspected her as if she were sizing up every bit of information she could get. That in and of itself was creepy, but Nessie ignored it.

In fact, she ignored Lauren in every sense. I hadn’t seen her so much as look at the older girl since we’d shown up. I couldn’t know for sure what had happened between them since Lauren had arrived two days ago, but I had a feeling it had been this same stone cold silence since they had met.

Absurdly, Rosalie sat between the two of them and was doing a poor job of pretending like everything was fine and dandy. She attempted to carry on conversation with both girls and use that to get them to talk to each other, but they offered her short, dismissive answers at their most responsive. Mostly, Lauren watched Nessie, and Nessie watched everyone but Lauren.

I wanted to talk to Rosalie in private for the first time in my life. I knew it was a terrible idea, that I didn’t know what it was I wanted to say. Still, as she sat there across from me, trying to make the two girls get along while acting like she didn’t understand the problem, I felt a strong urge to say something.

An urge that I quelled, forcing myself to instead listen to the other conversations in the room.

There was nothing I could do or say that would hold any weight with Rosalie, and it wasn’t my problem anyway. I kept repeating that over and over to myself, hoping it would stick.

**April 26th, 2010**

Emmett and Rosalie were gone after two weeks in Forks.

Afterward, Nessie started to look happier. I wasn’t sure if that was because she’d managed to work things out with her aunt and uncle or if she’d realized that having them around wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I didn’t ask, not wanting to bring up her feelings again, but I did notice that she never mentioned Lauren to me. Or Rosalie or Emmett, which wasn’t new. It had more or less been the norm since the two of them had moved away.

She still didn’t mention Alice’s or Jasper’s names that often either. A fact that I hadn’t found strange enough for it to occur to me, and even now, I might have been making a big deal out of things that didn’t mean anything.

Either way, the Cullens had managed to work their way to having a larger presence in my life yet again.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t through Nessie, who rarely mentioned any of her family members to me. Instead, it was Jake who had taken to complaining about various small things here or there. All of it pertaining to the Cullens.

“I think they’re hiding something.”

I had been looking down at my plate, not caring enough about Jake’s complaints to pay attention to them. It wasn’t like the Cullens being annoying was anything new. Jake had known that once before he got stuck up their asses. Now he was beginning to see it again, and none of his complaints could be taken very seriously by the rest of us.

But at those words, my eyes shot up to look at him. I heard a few clatters of forks hitting plates as the other members of our pack did the same thing. We were gathered around, eating dinner together at Billy’s house, just our pack and Billy. It was an occasion that wasn’t rare but didn’t exactly happen often either.

If the words had been spoken to me or a smaller group of us, I would have thought less of it. As it was, Jake had decided to say it to all of us, including Billy, who he knew had never come to trust the Cullens. That meant that he was dead serious.

“Like what exactly?” Embry asked, voicing the question that all of us were thinking. Already, I was formulating my own theories in my head, and I had a good hunch about where this was going.

Jake took a deep breath to steady himself before speaking. “I don’t know. That’s what’s frustrating me. All I know for sure is that they’ve started acting strange since Rosalie and Emmett told everyone about Lauren. Bella, especially, has been weird and distant. Nessie’s the only one acting normal. I know that, if anything is going on, they haven’t told her either. Whether it’s because they don’t think she’s prepared to know or because they’re worried about her telling me.”

He fell silent, but I could tell that he had something else to say. We sat there watching him until he continued. “I immediately started thinking it was about the Volturi.” He looked around at us until his eyes landed on his father and stayed there. “You think that too, right?”

Billy nodded. He had a serious but unsurprised look on his face, almost as if he’d been waiting for a moment like this. “It wouldn’t be surprising,” he allowed. “We know the Volturi are bound to attack them, and at this point, I’m not sure what else they could be hiding. We’re no longer in the days of suspecting them of biting humans.”

There was another silence around the room. No one had anything to say, but I knew it was because everyone was lost in their own fears about the Volturi. We’d all, except Billy, seen them firsthand, and we’d been able to learn about what fighting them would be like.

We knew that a possible attack would mean that we had no chance, but none of us had been worried about that happening since they last left Forks. We’d basked in the relief of that day, and we’d been comfortable with the idea that they would wait centuries, maybe millennia, before coming after the Cullens again. It would never be a problem we had to deal with.

Even Jake, who theoretically would be dealing with the Volturi at that distant point in the future, hadn’t worried over the past several years. Perhaps because that was too large of a timeframe for us to imagine after only living the short time we had in comparison to the Cullens.

Sam had shown worry, that much was true, but I had accepted that as him being cautious, not him believing that something would actually happen.

“What does this mean?” I asked, startling the others in the room.

Everyone turned to look at me, but I zeroed in on Jacob. He was our alpha. As much as I often hated there being someone who held complete authority over me if he wished to exercise it, it was true. As a wolf, it was my duty to carry out his orders, and if anything involving the Volturi was to happen, it was Jake who we would have to rely on to call the shots.

I needed to know what that meant. I needed to know what he expected of us.

“I don’t know,” Jake replied, sounding defeated. It wasn’t what you wanted to hear from someone in his position. Ideally, an alpha would always portray a sense of confidence. Sam certainly tried to do just that even when the rest of us knew it was fake.

Jake had never been like Sam. Not at the beginning and not now. I knew that this was a large part of the reason he hadn’t wanted to be alpha in the first place, a large part of why he’d thought he couldn’t be an alpha. He didn’t possess the same ability to pretend like he knew what to do no matter the situation. He was far more likely to admit to us that he had no idea what course of action to take than Sam was.

It was one of the reasons I was thankful to be in Jake’s pack instead of Sam’s. True, as Jake’s beta, I also possessed authority that I wouldn’t have had in Sam’s pack. But that wasn’t the only privilege I felt that I enjoyed. All of us seemed to be more equal in Jake’s pack when it came down to it. Something evidenced by the fact that Jake had yet to issue any alpha orders to any of us.

We couldn’t say the same of Sam, who had delivered alpha orders like it was a responsibility he had to perform despite not liking it.

“I’ve tried talking to Bella,” Jake continued. “She still won’t say anything. I wish I could ask Nessie to try to weasel something out of her or Edward, but I can’t do that. I’d feel terrible if I forced her to be a spy between me and her parents. There’s nothing else I can think of to try to figure it out.”

“They promised that they would tell us if the Volturi changed their plans,” Embry reminded Jake. He managed to sound optimistic, like he still held hope that they would keep that promise. “They’ve never gone against their word before. Not unless you count changing Bella, but even then, they had your permission, Jake.”

“I know,” Jake said with a sigh. “And I’d like to trust them. God knows that would make my life easier, but something is off. I’m positive of that, and after everything that happened with the Volturi, I don’t know if I can afford trusting them when my senses are telling me that something is wrong.”

“That’s you being a good leader,” Billy assured his son. “Your pack must always come first. I know that you know that. None of that is to say you should turn your back on the Cullens, but you have to think of your brothers and sister.”

Jake nodded. It was the same thing he had been told a million times. It was also, I believed, a large reason why he hadn’t wanted to be alpha Of course, there had been a million reasons that I had seen in Jacob’s thoughts over the years, but much of it came back to his reluctance to take on responsibility for so many people. He didn’t like it, and I thought that part of him still resented having to put the pack before everything but his imprint. Pack law expected her to come even before the pack, but I didn’t think Jake was as bothered by that.

“I’m going to keep trying to talk to Bella,” Jake told us. “I don’t know what else to tell you except that. I don’t think there’s anything we can do, but I thought you should know. It’s too difficult to try and keep blocking it out of my mind.”

“And Sam’s pack?” I asked. “Will you tell them?”

Jake looked torn.

“We can’t keep it from them,” Seth interjected.

Jake nodded, although he didn’t look like he knew how to approach the situation.

“We’ll play it by ear,” he said slowly. “I don’t know. Give me more time to try and get Bella to talk to me before any of you mention it.” He directed a stern gaze at the youngest members of the pack, which they shrugged off. “I’ll make the call about telling Sam.”

“Remember the patrols we had to run the last time he got worried about the Volturi,” Quil complained. He’d been a vocal complainer during those very patrols, and his face made it clear that he was turned off by the idea of doing it all over again. “That should be enough to keep us in line.”

“Right,” Jake said with a short nod. “Do that.”

“I don’t like it,” Seth grumbled, but he didn’t argue beyond that, possibly because Al reached out to take his hand under the table and got a smile out of him.

“I don’t like it either,” Jake said, which made me roll my eyes. I didn’t get why keeping the secret would be that big of a deal. As far as I could tell, Sam and the other pack knowing wouldn’t change anything, and it wasn’t like we were drafting up an elaborate lie.

Then again, some of the other guys had always been far more into the idea of a pack mind—where we told each other everything and were one person—than I was. Frankly, I found it bizarre.

“I think it’s for the best,” Jake concluded. “For now.”

Several of the other guys nodded. A few, particularly the youngest at the table, continued eating, not caring either way what was decided. Despite having seen the Volturi firsthand, the wolves who had phased after the battle with the newborns always acted more blasé about the possibility of fighting than us older wolves who’d experienced it did.

For the next several weeks, I tried my hardest to convince myself that I wasn’t worried. There was, after all, not much evidence that we should be more worried about the Volturi than we were before, but I never quite convinced myself that I should believe that.


	5. May

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to KBelle1 and TheEagerScribbler (both FFnet usernames) for beta reading this chapter.

**May 16th, 2010**

Having Rachel across from me at the Forks diner felt surreal. I wasn’t sure why. She had been making trips home with increasing frequency since she had moved away. These days, she was coming back every other weekend.

“It feels so much easier being here when I’m not living here,” she told me as she dabbed a French fry around in some ketchup.

I hummed in agreement, although I had never been able to understand. I’d wanted to escape La Push, sure. I’d desperately wanted to escape for years, but Rachel’s feelings felt foreign to me, possibly because she’d managed it and I hadn’t. I couldn’t understand what it was like to come back when you’d managed to escape.

“Less oppressive,” Rachel continued. “When you know you can get away from a place, I guess it’s always easier to be there. Like how visiting someone in prison would never feel like being in prison.”

I raised an eyebrow as she compared La Push to a prison, but I didn’t say anything. The comparison wasn’t a new one for me, even if I hadn’t stopped to think of it that way in a long time. Probably around the time I started getting away every day to go to Port Angeles, if I stopped to think about it.

“Paul’s an incentive too, right?” I asked, putting what was left of my hamburger back on my plate as I picked up my drink to take a sip. “That has to make coming back enjoyable.”

Rachel nodded, twirling a fry around in her hand absentmindedly.

“It is,” she agreed. “I miss him all the time when I’m in Seattle and he’s in La Push.”

Paul being in La Push felt like the only reason she came back to see me, but I was never going to accuse her of it. Whether or not she would bother to visit once she had Paul living with her again was an open question, and one I was not going to have an answer to until we were already living it.

“He only phased that one time on accident.”

Rachel nodded, but I could tell that my words had brought up something that bothered her. I hadn’t been able to see her reaction to Paul’s ‘accident’ as it was being called among the wolves, but I’d seen how she reacted to talking about it in the couple of months since: awkwardly and changing the subject as soon as possible.

“I know,” she said, false cheer in her voice. “And he’s gotten back on track really well. We don’t have another wolf to compare him too, but I think it’s impressive, right? How he quit cold turkey and has managed so well.”

I grinned and offered her a nod. “It is.”

It was the answer she needed, but it was also a truthful one. Paul was doing better than any of us had expected he would. The idea that he was proving us wrong also seemed to be a huge motivator for him, only dwarfed by the knowledge that he would be letting Rachel down if he screwed up.

When he had phased on accident, I hadn’t been able to see into his thoughts, but I had heard about the moment secondhand. Jared and Ethan had both told me stories about how horrible it had been to experience Paul’s sense of failure. Jared had described it as one of the worst emotions he’d ever felt from another wolf.

I wasn’t sure that Rachel had heard the same stories, but she had to have a sense of Paul’s guilt. When she spoke about it, she always tried to appear like it didn’t bother her, and I got the sense that such a blasé attitude was for Paul at least as much as it was for her.

“So,” Rachel continued, picking up her fork and using it to cut off a bite of the veggie burger that she had ordered on lettuce instead of a bun, “how’s work going?”

“Great,” I told her with a small smile. She looked up at me and grinned too. I’d noticed that Rachel was pleased that I had come to enjoy my job the way I had. “It’s the same old, same old. Nothing to talk about, but I enjoy it well enough. It’s less stressful than school was.”

“And you’re still cool with everyone?”

I nodded. “Yeah, everyone’s cool.”

I knew that was a rough spot for Rachel. After freelancing and working alone for so long, Rachel’s first few months back in an office hadn’t gone as smoothly as they could have on the coworker side of things.

“You still dealing with that annoying dude?”

Rachel groaned and rolled her eyes.

“I will be for a long time,” she complained. “It’s not like he’s going to quit anytime soon, and as he likes to remind me, he’s been there for five years. The fact that I was just hired means I have no idea what’s going on. Ignore that I was doing the same work for years at home.

“He’s not even that good. Out of everyone in the office, his work is the most mediocre, but he’s the one convinced that he’s a master.”

“Isn’t that always how it goes?” I asked. “The worst ones are convinced they’re the best. It might be a way of compensating.”

“He should direct some of that energy into learning. The other day, he had to bring me a handwritten note because something was wrong with his email, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it.” She stabbed at her burger with her fork. “He’s a computer engineer!”

She took a bite of the burger, taking the time to chew before she continued. “And if you brought it up to him today, he’d go on and on about how that area isn’t his specialty. Of course he didn’t know how to fix it, he says. Well, guess what, I went over there—couldn’t pass up an opportunity to show him up. I figured that, whatever it was, I could figure out a way to fix it and make him shut up. And, Leah, he’d made a typo in my email address. That was the only thing wrong. I couldn’t believe…

“God, I can’t stand that man. I’m so close to going off on him whether it gets me fired or not. But I won’t do it. I really do love this job in every way except him. I can’t afford to lose it because of my temper.

“It’s not like I don’t understand honest mistakes,” Rachel continued, in her element and far from stopping, “but he had been going on like there was a huge problem because his email wasn’t sending when it was a typo that he couldn’t catch despite how much he said he tried to figure out the problem. Fucking ridiculous.”

“Sounds like someone I would hate,” I said, sympathizing with Rachel’s plight. The guy did sound like a douchebag from her stories, and I doubted they were that far from the truth. Rachel wasn’t the type to exaggerate these things. She would have brushed it off until she couldn’t deal with him anymore. “I hope something manages to shut him up.”

“Doubt it,” Rachel said with a frown. “Not sure what would achieve that when nothing has for five years. Most people in the office hate him. It’s only the people who could fire him who seem to have anything nice to say. I’m not sure how he managed that when he seems oblivious to his shittiness towards the rest of us.”

“He’s not oblivious. He just doesn’t care.” I could be sure of that much without meeting the guy. “It sounds like he’s a poster child for egocentrism. He only cares about other people when it’s beneficial to him.”

Rachel nodded, looking pensive as she chewed on a fry. “That sounds about right.”

“But other than that you say everything is good,” I reminded her, not wanting to delve any further into the negative aspects of what had been such a huge life change for her.

A smile appeared on her face as she thought about the memories that my comment brought into the forefront of her mind. “It is,” she agreed. “I enjoy the job, and the other people in the office are easier to deal with. Plus, I’m in Seattle, and there’s so much to do. You know how much I love the atmosphere of that city, and it’s nice to see my college friends who haven’t left.”

I swallowed the last of my fries, humming in agreement. The few times I had gotten to see Joselyn recently had been precious. I knew that Rachel had a group of friends that she felt similarly about, and she had talked to me on the phone more than once about how much she was enjoying spending time with them since being back in Seattle.

Rachel continued cutting off pieces of her burger and chewing them at a slower pace than I was used to with the people I ate around. It wasn’t helped by the way she continued to talk.

There was one other question I had that Rachel had hardly skimmed over. One that I always wanted to hear more about when I talked to Rachel these days.

“How are you and Paul doing? Like, relationship wise…”

It wasn’t the first time I’d asked the question, although it always felt as awkward to ask as it had the first time. Rachel had been the one to break the ice by bringing up the subject herself the first several times we had discussed it after the move. After all, she couldn’t discuss everything about her werewolf boyfriend with her college friends. I was her only outlet.

Rachel grinned at me through another bite of her burger.

“We’re good,” she assured me, and I could tell that it was the truth. Just as it had been every other time we’d talked about it. While I’d wanted to hold onto hope that Rachel and Paul’s relationship would make it through this unscathed, I had been worried it was a useless hope. Each time Rachel told me differently, I breathed an inward sigh of relief.

“That’s good.”

Rachel nodded, stuffing her last bite into her mouth and struggling to chew it so that she could answer.

“It still sucks only getting to see Paul once a week, but I shouldn’t complain about that. I’m lucky I have a boyfriend who can run the distance between La Push and Seattle. Otherwise, I might never get to see him.”

Before I could respond, Rachel reached for her check that the waitress had left on our table earlier. We each got up, me grabbing my own check and the money I had pulled out of my wallet while waiting for Rachel to finish eating. I followed Rachel to the counter to pay, waiting impatiently for a chance to say what I thought without blurting it out in front of the clueless staff at the diner.

Rachel was humming some happy-sounding tune as she climbed into the driver’s seat of her car. I followed her into the passenger side, opening my mouth to speak as soon as our doors were both closed, separating us from the outside world.

“Do you think it’s the imprint?” I asked, fidgeting as I waited for Rachel to act offended. “The fact that you and Paul are okay, I mean.”

“Do I think we only managed it because of some magical force?” she asked, perhaps putting the question into more accurate words than the ones I’d chosen. She sounded disbelieving, like she couldn’t believe I’d dared asked the question.

I nodded, but I also couldn’t keep my eyes on her, instead turning to look out the window as the trees sped by.

There was a long moment of silence before Rachel sighed.

“No,” she said, voice neutral. I felt brave enough to glance back at her, and I found her frowning but less harshly than before. “I don’t. Like I’ve said before, Leah, I’m not giving up credit for mine and Paul’s relationship to some mystical force. We deserve it for ourselves.”

I nodded. “I know, I know. I don’t want to take it away from you either. I just...I just wanted to hear what you thought.”

“I’ve told you before,” she said, voice rising in annoyance.

“I know,” I repeated. “I remember, but I think I needed to hear it again?”

Her posture and facial expression softened as she heard the question in my answer.

“I understand.” It was the least confrontational she’d been since we’d gotten in the car and I had first opened my mouth. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thank you,” I whispered, causing her to sigh.

She reached out with one hand to shove my shoulder as if she were trying to break up any of the stronger emotions the two of us were feeling. I offered her a grin before her eyes turned back onto the road.

“Someday you’re going to have to stop asking me this sort of thing,” Rachel continued in a softer voice. “Someday you’re going to have to accept that you can be with Embry without imprinting coming in and destroying everything, and you’re going to have to trust that you two can make it work without imprinting’s support. Because you can, Leah. Take it from an imprint.”

I nodded as I tried to swallow away the tightness in my throat. “I know we can. Sometimes it’s just hard to convince myself not to worry when I keep thinking that the second I let my guard down could be the second that something goes wrong. I don’t even know what that something would be.”

Rachel raised an eyebrow. “I would have thought that knowing that ‘something’ you’re worried about would be easy. Embry imprinting, right? That’s what you’re scared of before anything else?”

I shrugged, looking away from her again. My words were opening myself up to judgment and to Rachel’s analysis of my relationship issues. I didn’t like it, but at this point I didn’t think I could have stopped myself from talking if I’d tried.

“I am. I’m terrified of that when I let myself dwell on it, but there’s also this other overwhelming sense of dread. One that feels larger than my fears about Embry imprinting. You know that I’ve always hated imprinting, and that never changed. But in the beginning, I insisted that it couldn’t mean soulmates or that, if it did, soulmates were overrated. Over time, I think I came to associate it with what’s needed to make a relationship work though. It’s made me worried that no imprint means that Embry and I don’t have what it takes to make it work whether or not Embry imprints on someone else.

“And I think the idea that Embry and I might fail because of our own failings as people scares me more than the thought that he’s meant to be with someone else.”

“Why?”

I shrugged at Rachel’s question. “Who knows? I don’t. I can’t figure it out. I guess I’m more scared about me screwing everything up than anything else. Like, if Embry dumps me when there’s no imprint, then he’s breaking up with me because I wasn’t enough, not because he’s meant to be with someone else. When I think about it, I think that it should be at least close to the same thing, but it doesn’t feel like it is.”

I rubbed at my eyes, feeling tired. “I sound stupid,” I complained more to myself than to Rachel, but she still heard it.

She sighed, reaching over again but patting my arm this time instead of shoving me. I glanced over to see a small, encouraging smile on her lips. “It doesn’t sound stupid,” she assured me. “I get it. Really, I do. Of course you’d be more worried about being dumped because of you than because of someone else. I get it.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she assured me. “But I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Embry’s been in love with you for a long time. Longer than you knew-”

“I wouldn’t call it love,” I was quick to interject. “More like infatuation.”

Rachel shot me a quick glare as we passed the boundary into La Push. “Embry’s been in love with you for a long time,” she repeated, unperturbed. “And I don’t think that’s going to change unless some mystical force tries to change it. Even then, I’m not sure that it would work to change his mind about you.”

“Everyone always says shit like that,” I said, throat continuing to tighten. I blinked in an attempt to clear away the tears threatening to spill over. “And it’s not like I don’t believe you mean it. It’s not like I don’t believe that Embry means it when he says it. I do.”

“You think we’re optimistic morons who are going to be proven wrong in the end.” There had been no question in Rachel’s words. She knew that was exactly what I was thinking. There was no use pretending otherwise. “Leah,” Rachel continued, “I’m the person least likely to be described as an optimist.”

“I think I’ve beaten you there.”

Rachel snorted. “Yeah, probably,” she said, giving in. “But I get second place then. In any group that doesn’t include you, Leah Clearwater, I would be the person least likely to be described as an optimist.”

“That’s why I don’t get why you’re convinced that Embry and I are going to be fine.”

“Leah, have you met Embry Call?” Rachel asked with a roll of her eyes. “That boy is a committer. I don’t know if he could do the casual dating thing. It doesn’t sound like him. Once he has feelings for you, they're not going away. He will move mountains to keep your relationship healthy. The guy could imprint on anyone in the world, and he’d still be with you because he’s already committed to you. It’s a done deal for him. Nothing will change it. If you want to get rid of him, you’ll have to break up with him yourself. It’s the only way it will ever happen.”

“How do you know him so well?” I grumbled.

“I’m not saying anything that isn’t common knowledge to all of La Push. You know it too. You’re choosing to ignore it because your fear has taken over your rationality. Honest to God, Leah…

“Let me tell you a story. Becca and I were babysitting Jake, Embry, and Quil one day, and the three of them decided that they wanted to put together this toy racetrack that Jake had. Turns out that thing was difficult to build by four-year-old standards. Jake and Quil gave up after five minutes. Embry kept at it until he’d built the whole thing. Struggled with it for ages. Ever since then, I’ve thought of that as quintessentially Embry.”

It was. Rachel was right when she said that I knew that, even if I hadn’t known of that particular story. I could picture it in my mind. Embry hunched over the track, trying piece after piece until two of them snapped together. His satisfaction once he’d built the entire thing.

It was the same way Embry approached everything.

“Okay,” I allowed. “I get it. I do. It’s not like I don’t know that I worry too much about everything.”

Rachel’s expression took on a new seriousness. “That’s understandable,” she said, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. She was pulling up to my house now. There was a pause as she pulled up to the curb and put the car in park. “After everything, it makes sense that you would worry. Especially when you throw the existence of imprinting on top of what was already a crappy situation. I get it. No one should blame you for feeling like you do.”

I twiddled with my fingers, feeling embarrassed. While I considered myself over the past, it was uncomfortable for it to be brought up as the reason for my current insecurities. I didn’t like thinking about things that way.

“I don’t want to feel like that’s still controlling my life,” I admitted. “It’s fucked up, not being able to trust Embry when I know I should. I know he’s not going to betray me. If I believed that about one person in the entire world, it would be him, yet I still doubt him so often.”

I growled in frustration, causing Rachel to reach out and pat my arm.

“I understand,” she said, and really, it was the only thing she could have said at that moment that would have been close to adequate. “I’m always there to talk when you need to,” she reminded me.

I nodded, offering her a small smile that wasn’t convincing. The two of us were talking frequently despite Rachel being in Seattle. It was a noticeable change from the last time she had left. When she’d gone to college, I’d known that Rachel wanted to cut off as many ties to La Push as possible.

When we’d grown distant with each other, I hadn’t blamed her. In fact, I’d felt proud of her for escaping, even if our friendship was a casualty in the process. As it turned out, we’d somehow formed a friendship that had managed to bounce back from that when she came back. The thought put a genuine smile on my face.

“Thanks, Rachel.”

I reached out for the door handle. Rachel nodded in acknowledgment.

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I meant it.”

I nodded one last time and pushed the door open.

As I walked up the front walk to the house, I realized that I did feel better. Not the expected outcome when I had first asked Rachel about her and Paul. Come to think of it, I couldn’t figure out how we had gotten where we had, but I was thankful for it.

**May 30th, 2010**

I rolled around on the bed again, trying to find a new position that was comfortable. I was running out of them. What had started off as a comfortable bed had morphed into one that might as well have been made of granite.

Feeling impatient, I clicked a button on my phone, causing the screen to light up. Only a minute had passed since the last time I’d looked.

It was difficult to maintain a friendship when finding the time to call each other was this difficult. I had gotten off work several hours ago, but Joselyn had been on her way to meet with her writing group, something she was still doing.

Laying the phone back down on my stomach, I tapped my fingers against the screen.

She would call me as soon as she finished with them. That’s what she had told me, and I knew that sitting around like that call would come at any second was a guarantee that the call would never come. But there was nothing else to do. Embry was running patrol, which was why I had wanted to talk to Joselyn so badly.

My phone began to vibrate a second before my ringtone sounded through the room. I picked the phone up out of instinct, accepting the call and pressing it to my ear.

“Hello?” I responded like I didn’t know that it would be Joselyn on the other end of the line.

“Leah, hi,” she greeted in her usual bubbly tone.

I smiled as I heard her voice. It had been two weeks since we’d been able to talk. Since then, we’d only been texting back and forth. We did that on a near daily basis, but it wasn’t the same. Today, in particular, I was missing my best friend. The best friend that I didn’t make out with, that was.

“Hi, Joselyn,” I returned. “How was the writing group?”

“I got a great critique on the third chapter of my novel,” she started, and I could tell that this was gearing up to be a long speech. Few things got Joselyn rambling as much as her own writing did. It was easy to tolerate because she didn’t build herself up. Instead, she would go on and on about the things she needed to improve, always in a tone of voice that told you that she knew she’d work it out to be perfect in the end. I was fascinated by her continual need to rework things. It hinted at a drive that I didn’t possess.

“Joanna pointed out that it drags because I introduced a character at the wrong point in the story, so we talked about how I should move things around and some other changes. I’m going to go over it in the next couple of days. Work out the changes we discussed. It’ll be better when I’m done with that. It’s a relief when you have a breakthrough like this.”

“Sounds good,” I responded. Whenever Joselyn launched into these rants, I never had anything of worth to add. What did I know about writing and the revision process? Only what I had heard Joselyn repeat to me time and time again. She would let me read her writing at times, even humor me by asking for an opinion, but neither one of us expected me to contribute anything of worth.

My thoughts while reading were more along the lines of “oh, that’s interesting” or “I got kind of bored here, but I don’t know what to tell you to do about it.” That was all I had.

Joselyn hummed in agreement. She was quiet for a moment, and I knew she was transitioning out of writer mode like she did every time she remembered that that wouldn’t get much of anything out of me.

“How’s work been?” she asked.

I’d known from the time I accepted the job that this question would take over my life. Sure enough, it was what people asked me before anything else, whether I was talking to Joselyn or Embry or my mom or Emily. It was what everyone wanted to know, the natural start to every conversation.

When adults didn’t know how else to start a conversation, they asked about work. Even as a kid I had known that. It was odd to be on the receiving end of the question even a year since I had been hired.

“It’s been good,” I said. My standard response even to my best friend who I knew I could always share the truth with.

The answer wasn’t a lie in any sense of the word. Work was good. It was also the same every day. If I were working in Seattle, like Rachel, I imagined that I would have more anecdotes to share. New things would happen a regular basis.

As it was, I was working in Forks where everything was dictated by routine. The last time anything had changed in that town was when it had become the home of one of the few half vampires in existence, and so few knew about that particular claim to fame. They went about their daily lives quite content with the knowledge that nothing of note had happened to them.

I was content with that too for the most part, but then Joselyn would ask me questions about life, and I would start to feel embarrassed that I had become a boring adult. One who had nothing new to share other than that work was just fine.

“That’s good.” Joselyn’s response had also become our standard. It was how she responded every time I gave her my answer. It was another aspect of my new routine, and it was possibly my least favorite one.

It felt like the two of us had fallen into a rut. Our conversations were the same these days. We followed the same script and discussed, or maybe didn’t discuss, the same things. Nothing changed.

At first, I had liked that because I thought it meant that our friendship was safe. It wasn’t going anywhere because it was staying the same.

Now I was starting to worry. It had become too familiar, and it felt like we were going through the motions instead of sharing anything genuine with one another. What did that mean? If I couldn’t be genuine with my best friend, then how much of a best friend was I being? Thinking about it was often too difficult, but it was becoming harder to ignore.

I debated for a second what to say next. It would have been easy to stick to the script. I’d been doing so for nearly a year. What was one more day?

But I couldn’t. Not today. It weighed too heavily on my mind, and I needed to discuss it with Joselyn. Because, if I couldn’t, then I wasn’t sure what our relationship was worth, and that terrified the shit out of me.

“It’s fine, but I’m not sure if I like that,” I admitted, placing the blame more on my job than the other aspects of life that had me feeling disillusioned. I didn’t know how to bring up my fears that were directed at Joselyn without sounding like an asshole.

There was a pause before Joselyn said, “What do you mean?”

I could tell that she was confused by my comment. I didn’t know where to go next. It didn’t matter because Joselyn beat me to speaking.

“Are you unhappy there?” she asked. “I know it wasn’t your ideal job when you started, but I thought you’d grown to like it.”

“I did,” I said. “I do. I do like it. That’s not what I’m saying. I think it’s more this whole being an adult thing. It feels weird, you know? Like, it hits me sometimes that I’m an adult with a job. Even if I’m still living with my mom. Let’s not go there. Sometimes I feel like I’ve settled into life too early or something. I feel like an imposter trying to be an adult.”

Another pause, and then Joselyn said quietly, “Leah.”

There was too much sympathy in her voice. I didn’t like it. Joselyn was typically good about not sounding sympathetic when I didn’t want her to.

I maneuvered around on my bed for no other reason than to distract myself from the perceived judgment that I could feel through the phone. Now that that comment was out there, I felt self-conscious. I no longer wanted to have this conversation if I had ever wanted to have it in the first place.

“Please don’t get like that,” I pleaded, although I tried to make myself sound confident. Like I wasn’t as embarrassed as I was. Even as I tried, I knew that Joselyn saw through my facade. “I’m not telling you that so you can feel sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for me. It’s a natural transition. What do they call it? A quarter life crisis? I guess I’m having one of those. The term kind of fits I guess.”

Joselyn was silent through the phone. I could imagine her expression though, and it was one of sympathy. So I kept talking as if I could make it go away if I said a bit more.

“The only reason I’m bringing it up,” I continued, taking a deep breath as I prepared myself to get into it, “is because college both feels like it was years ago and feels like it was only yesterday. It’s this weird thing. Like I’m living in the past, and I don’t know how to reconcile current me with past, college me.”

“What does that mean?” Joselyn asked, interrupting me. 

“How the hell do I know?” I said. “I don’t understand it. At this point, it’s like my life is a series of crises. I’m never going to figure shit out.”

“Don’t say that,” Joselyn chastised. 

“Why not? It’s true.” I was gaining traction. “I never have my shit together.”

“You’re a twenty-something. What twenty-something has their shit together?”

I thought of Emily and Sam, already married and with two kids even if one of them had been thrust on them unexpectedly. I thought of Jared and Kim, already married and who would probably have kids soon. I thought of Rachel and Paul, not married and who were living apart yet still managed to seem like they had shit much better figured out than I did.

“Everyone,” I responded.

I couldn’t get into it with Joselyn. While I always told her as much as I could, there were limits to what she could know. She knew everyone's names. She knew who was married and about Sam and Emily’s kids, but she would never understand the significance of their relationships. I couldn’t tell her that.

“They do not.” I could imagine Joselyn rolling her eyes. “Maybe they look like they do on the outside. No one shares all their fears with the world.”

“I’m pretty sure everyone knows that I’m flailing along with no idea what I’m doing.”

“You might be surprised.” At least Joselyn’s voice didn’t sound as serious anymore. There was amusement mixed into her words. “Whatever it is you’re worried about, they don’t notice it. Well, except Embry, but he notices everything.”

I scoffed, knowing it was true. Never in my life would I be able to hide something from Embry. Even though I hadn’t voiced these thoughts to him in the exact words I was using with Joselyn, I knew that he was already aware of it. That didn’t bother me anymore.

“Maybe they don’t. I don’t know, but none of that is the point.” This was going in a different direction than what I had intended. We still hadn’t broached the one topic that I wanted to talk about.

“And what is the point?”

I took a deep breath, preparing myself.

“It’s about our friendship,” I admitted. “About everything I just said and our friendship.”

My heart felt like it would beat out of my chest as I waited for Joselyn’s response. It didn’t come for a long time, and I could hear her moving around as if she were pacing on the other end of the line.

“What about our friendship?” she asked, and I could hear a note of fear in her voice.

That wasn’t what I had wanted, but I also wasn’t surprised it was there. Not with how terribly I’d managed to get those words out.

“Not anything bad,” I said in a rush. “I hope not at least.”

“Leah, what the hell are you talking about? Is something wrong? Between us? Because if something is wrong between the two of us then I have no idea what the hell it is. As far as I can tell, everything’s fine.”

It was the closest to angry I had heard her get when said anger was directed at me, and that was what I had been expecting. That didn’t mean I was handling it well. My hands shook, and I thought I might drop the phone before I had a chance to respond. Despite my reputation among the pack for being a ruthless bitch, I didn’t handle possible rejection from the few people I trusted well.

“I’m not angry if that’s what you think,” I assured her. I took a deep breath. “Just give me a moment to explain without interruptions, okay? Because this is terrifying, and I think I need room to work it out for myself.”

I struggled to control my breathing as I felt like I was listening to Joselyn think through the phone. Just asking for that much had felt emotionally draining, but I hoped that Joselyn, as my best friend, would allow me to have my request.

“Okay,” she said. Relief surged through my body even though I could hear the hesitance in her voice. She wasn’t sure she wanted me to tell her what I had been thinking.

“Everything’s changing for better or worse,” I began. I’d been struggling for days to try and figure out what I was going to say to her. That was about as far as I had gotten in my rehearsed speeches. It had never sounded right, so I’d reworded that sentence over and over again. It still didn’t sound right, but it was all I had.

“It’s strange knowing I’m an adult with a job,” I continued. “And you and Embry are still in Port Angeles at school. It’s not like anything has changed how I feel about you guys, but it’s different. We don’t talk in person every day. Hell, we don’t even get to see each other that often anymore. And I guess I’m scared that that means that things will change. Not just change but that they’ll fall apart. I’m scared our friendship will fall apart because he hardly get to see each other.”

“Oh, Leah.”

And just like that the sympathy had returned. I felt my face flush as I waited for Joselyn to say something else, to respond with more words to what I had admitted to. It had been bothering me for weeks, if not months, but I didn’t feel any of the relief that I might have expected upon the admission. I felt embarrassed. If I could, I would have taken it back in that moment.

“That’s not going to happen,” Joselyn said. I could tell that her answer was genuine.

“I’m not saying you’re going to up and abandon me, Joselyn. I mean that our lives are different enough that it would be easy for us to grow apart. We don’t talk for a week. Then it’s a month. Next thing you know it’s been years, and we can’t consider ourselves friends anymore. It wouldn’t be anyone’s fault. It would just be what it is.”

“It would be both of our faults,” Joselyn said, a slight edge to her voice. “But that’s why we don’t let it happen. That’s why we keep talking to each other, keep showing interest in each other’s lives. It’s why we keep caring about each other.”

“That’s what I want,” I whispered, like saying it any louder would be too much. “But I don’t know if I can believe that we’ll be able to manage it.”

“Just like you can’t believe that Embry will stay with you forever?” This time I knew I wasn’t making up the anger that could be heard in her voice.

“What are you talking about Joselyn? Where is that coming from?”

“Leah, don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You think I haven’t noticed that you’ve avoided talking about him for months? Everytime I bring him up, ask how things are going with the two of you, you get vague. The only real information I get about your relationship is from Embry. He’ll still talk to me about you.”

“I talk to you about it as much as I always did.”

“We talk the same amount yeah, but not about Embry. Never about Embry.”

I didn’t agree with her, but I wasn’t going to argue. Neither one of us could pull out qualitative data on how much we had or hadn’t discussed Embry.

“Maybe there’s less to say,” I said instead. “I mean, we’re together, and we’re happy. Nothing has changed, so maybe I have less to tell you and that’s it.”

Joselyn sighed through the phone, and from the volume of it, I knew that it had to have been for my benefit.

“That’s such bullshit. There’s more going on than that,” she said bluntly.

“Joselyn, I don’t understand what you think is going on because everything is fine. Everything is so fine that I can’t come up with a reason why you’re thinking like this.”

“Then we have a similar problem because I don’t get it either. On a shallow level, yeah, you and Embry seem fine. The two of you should be fine. You’re perfect for each other. The two of you should be this amazing power couple who everyone’s jealous of and who’s going to be together forever. Maybe even do the house with two point five kids thing. I don’t know. Just all that disgustingly perfect stuff.

“But instead you’ve started being weird, and I don’t know what to make of that. You talk about Embry less, try to change the topic when I mention him. The only conclusion I can come to is that you’re scared, but I’m confused about why. Because this is Embry Call we’re talking about. The dude is in love with you. You’re in love with him. I can’t figure out what could be the root cause of this fear that you’re exuding, Leah.”

“Maybe because I’m not exuding any fear, Joselyn.”

“Right, Leah, and I’m the Pope.”

“Well, you are asexual.”

“Save it, Leah. That’s not even right. He’s celibate, not asexual, and you fucking know there’s a difference. I’ll listen when you’re ready for some serious introspection. I’d hoped you’d gotten past this when you got over your fears and admitted your feelings to Embry. But apparently you’re not there yet. Maybe that’s why you’re concerned about not really being an adult. Maybe you won’t be one until you sit down and figure your shit out.

“I’ll talk to you later.”

The line went dead, and I took the phone away from my ear to stare at it in shock.

It was so unlike her that I almost felt like I’d dreamt the entire conversation. Joselyn wasn’t capable of being rude. That, perhaps, had been one of the things that drew me to her. I put off a lot of people because of my tendency to be a bitch, and the fact that Joselyn was one of the few people willing to put up with me in spite of that had, admittedly, been one of the reasons we became close.

Mine and Joselyn’s lives were too different now. We lived too far away. Our friendship was always doomed to have an expiration date once we were on different paths, and now that expiration date felt sooner than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been edited a bit since it was originally posted, but it wasn't anything that affects the story itself.


	6. June

**June 6th, 2010**

The phone was heavy in my hand as I stared down at it. I’d been doing that a lot over the past week, ever since the day of my last phone call with Joselyn. It had been through this phone that we’d argued. I couldn’t shake that thought from my mind. It had become something far more menacing than a phone.

I knew that calling Joselyn was my only option for apologizing, but something about doing it through the phone felt wrong. It was like another reminder of how distant we were from each other.

Still, I couldn’t go all the way to Port Angeles. Joselyn was busy, and there was no good way to plan such a trip to fit both of our schedules without talking to her first. Which meant I had to pick up the phone either way. I wasn’t going to get out of that.

Embry had been urging me to do it for days. Joselyn, he said, was upset about it too. She wanted to talk to me but felt that I needed to be the one to apologize. He said we were both being stubborn, and one of us had to break if we wanted it to get better. I had a sneaking suspicion that Joselyn was being told similar things.

Joselyn was right in thinking that I should apologize. Shit like this was always my fault. I was, after all, a bitch and everyone knew it. It was a label that I no longer felt like I could escape, and my incredulity that Joselyn had put up with it for so long had returned.

Taking a deep breath, I took the plunge and dialed Joselyn’s number. I still didn’t know what it was that I was going to say. My heart drummed in my ears as I waited for her to pick up.

Or for it to go to voicemail. I wouldn't have been surprised. I almost expected it, and I reminded myself that could easily come about because of how busy she was. Still, the possibility didn’t ease my anxiety. The few short seconds it took to wait for something to happen stretched on for millennia.

Then the dialtone clicked off, signaling that Joselyn had picked up the phone.

“Hello?” Joselyn asked. There was a nervous tone to her voice that was certainly a result of seeing my name on her caller ID.

“Hi,” I answered. Then I added, “It’s me. Leah.”

“Hi,” Joselyn echoed. I had a feeling these unnecessary, short responses were going to be a recurring feature of this conversation if I didn’t steer us in the right direction.

“Are you able to talk?” As soon as I said it, I rubbed my forehead in frustration.

“Obviously. Otherwise, I would have let the call go to voicemail.” The bite in her voice was so unlike Joselyn that it caused the churning in my stomach to worsen, not lessen. Every second of this phone call made me more nervous about saying what I needed to say.

It didn't help that I still felt lost as to what it was that I needed to say. I had a general idea, but I didn't have the right words. I wasn’t even sure if I had the right ideas. My mind was little more than a jumbled mess that I was struggling to make sense of.

There was a moment of silence as I tried to untangle the thoughts into words that would make sense, but before I could do so, Joselyn sighed.

“Look, I’m sorry, Leah. I really am.”

“What?” I asked out of shock and confusion. “I called because I thought I was the one who needed to apologize.”

There was another sigh from Joselyn before she answered. “My apology doesn’t meant that you can’t apologize,” she pointed out, a note of bitterness in her voice. “But I do feel guilty too. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think you should have heard some of that stuff. I would stand by a lot of what I said, but I’m sorry that it came out the way it did. I should have told you what I thought calmly and not yelled it at you.”

“I don’t think you could call that yelling. Harsh, yes, but there’s no way that was yelling.”

“Well, harsh is bad enough,” Joselyn said.

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and grin, knowing that Joselyn couldn’t see it. My anxiety had only lessened a bit, but Joselyn being torn up about not using the right tone of voice was so like her that I couldn’t help but be amused.

It felt foolish to have believed that she would never forgive me. Of course she would. Joselyn was one of the most forgiving people I knew, and while I typically thought of that as a foolish characteristic for anyone to possess, I was thankful Joselyn possessed it in that moment.

“I’m sorry too,” I said, trying to ride on the coattails of my amusement. It was difficult to forget about my nerves. “I was harsh too.”

“You still don’t get why I was angry, do you?”

There was that edge to her voice, but I could tell that she was struggling to maintain it. She didn’t want to get angry at me again, and this time I could also tell that she had my best interests at heart, even if she was getting frustrated by what she had perceived as my hard headedness.

“I’m not sure at this point, Joselyn.” It no longer felt like such a struggle to speak. I felt like I had permission to explain my thoughts and feelings without immediate judgment or condemnation, and I focused on explaining them to the best of my ability. “I think I get what you’re angry about,” I said. “Yet at the same time, I don’t think I agree with you. Like, that stuff about Embry. I don’t think I’m doing what you said I am, and I don’t want to make you angry at me anymore. I just don’t get why you’re accusing me of what you are.”

Another moment of silence. Another sigh from Joselyn.

“I believe you,” she assured me. Her voice sounded more sympathetic than annoyed, but I wasn’t sure that I liked it any more than before. “But I stand by what I said. Remember how oblivious you managed to stay towards your feelings for Embry for so long? And that was even though everyone around you knew about them. Would you be able to trust that I’m noticing something about you and your actions that you haven’t realized yet? Could you at least give me the benefit of the doubt on that?”

That hadn’t been a request I had expected to receive. It was unlike any request that Joselyn, or anyone else I knew for that matter, had made to me, and there was such a genuineness to it. She was trying to act in my best interest, even if I continued to disagree with her over what the truth was.

“No,” I admitted, trying to ignore the thought of Joselyn’s disappointed face. I could see it in my mind no matter how steadfastly I tried to erase it. “I can’t. I do believe that that’s what you believe, but I know myself better than anyone else. I know my own feelings, and I know that you’re worried about nothing, Joselyn. Can you believe that? Can you give me the benefit of the doubt on that?”

It took her a while, but her eventual response was what I knew it would be.

“No.”

I drummed my fingers against my thigh, waiting for her to elaborate. I knew that she would if I gave her the time.

“I can’t,” she continued. “I know that’s what you believe too, but I’m not going to lie and say that I believe it. Eventually, you’re going to have to realize that other people may see things more clearly than yourself, and then you’ll start to take me seriously. You’ll look at yourself and see what I’m seeing.”

“And what exactly are you seeing?”

“Someone who’s terrified of falling in love even though she’s already done it. Someone who’s a flight risk because she doesn’t believe that someone can love her, can keep loving her. All because she thinks so little of herself.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. I hadn’t been expecting those words, and they shocked me. I thought of Sam, of everything I had felt since what had happened. I considered myself to be over it, but Joselyn’s words stirred up old wounds. Wounds that I wanted to be gone.

“I can’t do this.” Getting the words out of my throat was difficult. I didn’t think I would manage until they were already out and being transmitted through the phone.

“I figured,” Joselyn replied, and the edge was back in her voice.

But that didn’t scare me anymore. Instead, I felt indignant. Even if I had problems, they were my problems, not Joselyn’s. This wasn’t her place. I no longer wanted to listen to her try to swoop in and fix any of my problems whether they were real or imagined.

And I maintained that these were imagined.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Joselyn continued. “About safe stuff, I promise. I won’t bring this up again until you’re ready, but I hope you start to think, Leah. Try to help yourself.”

I didn’t say anything as Joselyn hung up without a goodbye for the second time in a row. This time didn’t sting as much as the last. Instead, I felt a numbness settle over my body. I was fine. I would be fine.

I needed to move on like this conversation had never happened. Joselyn wouldn’t bother me about it again.

**June 16th, 2010**

“You want to what?”

Jake shot me a look like I shouldn’t have had to ask that question, but I didn’t agree.

“You think that will work?” I asked, looking around at the rest of the pack who had filled the room. “Just barging into the Cullen’s house-”

“We’re not going to barge in,” Jacob interrupted. Frustration colored his voice. Such a common occurrence these days when the vamps seemed to have him close to his wit’s end each and every day. “We’re going to go for a visit. That’s normal.”

“Um, it’s not though,” Quil pointed out. “For you, maybe it is. You’re over at that damn house all the time. Us? I can’t remember the last time I was there, and I’m okay with that. That place reeks.”

“I don’t care how you feel about the smell,” Jake said through gritted teeth. “We’ve got to figure out what’s going on. I’m tired of them acting like nothing’s up. Are you going to go with me or not?”

Jake looked at me, and I had a feeling that he knew it was because I was a sure bet. Mentally, I was groaning, and I knew that it was because a part of my brain had already decided that I was going along with this. I was beta after all. I had a duty to the pack to do what the alpa requested of me, and Jake wanted me to do this. It would qualify as pack business. For once, my status was working against me.

“I’ll go,” I said with a sigh.

Jake nodded, not surprised, and it was confirmed for me that he’d known I would be the easiest to convince. His gaze turned next to Seth: the notorious easy sell within the pack. Even now I thought that he hero worshipped Jake in a quieter way than in the past, and he would do anything Jacob asked of him.

“I don’t like ganging up on them,” Seth began, “but I’ll go.”

Jake’s eyes turned to each of our pack members in turn, and soon, everyone had agreed. Frankly, I was surprised that the youngest members were invited. It seemed unnecessary. They added nothing to our intended purpose. I thought Jake and I would have sufficed as visitors, but I got the feeling he was banking on intimidating the Cullens through numbers.

After all, there would be eight of us on the Cullens’ doorstep, and there were only three of them in Forks. Two if you decided to discount Nessie, which seemed reasonable. It was unlikely she was in on the secret considering how easily she would give it up to Jake.

“We’ll go tomorrow.”

Standing at the front of the room with a clenched fist, Jake looked like the perfect picture of a leader. One who was determined that we were going to win something. He had chosen a hell of a time to come into his own as alpha. I’d never seen him like this before.

The confidence might have been misplaced. I wasn’t convinced that we’d be able to make the Cullens talk. Us showing up together didn’t change our chances. The Cullens were too aware of the fact that we weren’t a threat. They were, after all, the family of Jacob’s imprint.

**June 17th, 2010**

I didn’t like that showing up at casa de Cullen made me nervous. The vamps had stopped being intimidating a long time ago. Hell, I could claim half of them as family if it served my purposes, but I would never stoop low enough to try that. I much preferred pretending like Bella wasn’t the daughter of my stepfather. It made me feel better about life.

But I shouldn’t have been nervous about entering the house, and it wasn’t the entering of the house that had me nervous per se.

Instead, I couldn’t stop worrying about what the conflict we were about to start would look like. Well, maybe the conflict we were going to continue. The point could be made that the Cullens had started it by concealing information.

Regardless of who was responsible, it was about to come to the forefront, and that was a huge risk when vampires and shapeshifters were involved. Us wolves had been created to kill vampires, and I didn’t think it mattered much what the official friendship status was if we got angry at each other. I didn’t want to hold back anyone from hurting anyone else today.

Edward greeted us at the door with a tightlipped expression, but he was nothing but polite as he ushered us in. All eight of us, without one comment or question about why we were there.

The younger wolves had each been here only a few times, and I wasn’t sure they’d gotten to come inside the house back then. Most of the wolves avoided it at all costs due to the smell. Jake was the only one of us who had adapted. While the rest of us rubbed at our noses, Jake maintained a confident facade and appeared to not have detected the noticeable odor.

He led the way into the house, taking a seat on a couch as if nothing were out of the ordinary. The other guys followed after him obediently, either taking the seats on either side of him or shuffling behind the couch, not willing to spread out further in the room. Bringing up the rear, I rolled my eyes. They already looked hostile, and nothing had been said.

I claimed the armrest of the couch, Embry beside me. It gave me a feeling of superiority being perched above the other wolves on the couch.

Bella and Edward sat across from us, trying to appear as foreboding as an entire group of wolves. They didn’t give off as intimidating of a demeanor as we did. Bella looked more confused than anything else. Edward was struggling to appear friendly, but I could tell that he didn’t feel like we were friends.

The vampires knew what this was about. There was no other explanation for why so many wolves had appeared on their doorstep today.

I inspected both of them to take in their demeanor. Only when I had finished inspecting Bella and Edward did I bother to notice Nessie sticking her head out from behind the couch. She watched us with a hint of fear in her eyes. Not fear of us but fear of what she sensed was about to happen between her family and her second family.

Jake’s eyes were on her, but he didn’t motion her over like he typically would have. I watched as Nessie edged around the back of the couch her parents sat on, getting closer to us as if no one would notice if she did it little by little.

Jake tore his eyes away from her and back to the Cullens. His eyes flickered between Bella and Nessie, almost ignoring Edward all together. Bella’s eyes kept flickering away from his gaze, and I could tell that she felt guilty about whatever it was she was helping conceal.

“We need to talk,” Jacob announced, although that much was evident to everyone gathered in the room. Jake continued to speak before any of the vampires could say anything. “You’re hiding something from us, and I would like to know what it is.”

I could sense the frustration emanating off Jake. He was struggling to keep his voice under control, to not show the vamps how angry he was after their continued lies. But he was failing. The vampires knew as well as we did how he felt.

Edward’s eyes moved to me, and my own eyes narrowed, challenging him like I seemed to do every time he was in front of me. Edward only offered a smirk before glancing away, but a split second later, I felt Embry’s hand on my thigh.

I looked down to see him scowling at Edward, and I felt surprised. He never got jealous, and even now I didn’t think that was the best word to describe his actions. It was more like he was being protective, but even that was out of character. I was a wolf. I didn’t need protecting.

Except, perhaps, from vampires, and that was the only reason I could find for the sudden change in character.

I didn’t welcome it, but now wasn’t the time to argue about that. Instead, I reached down to grip Embry’s hand in my own, figuring that it would be a helpful anchor for the coming conversation.

“Perhaps it is best if we discuss what you’ve come to discuss,” Edward responded in what was meant to be an authoritative voice. I didn’t find it calming. It was more infuriating than anything else.

“Right,” Jake replied. It was clear to me that he wasn’t sure where he was going with this. While yesterday he had been a pillar of confidence, it was becoming obvious that he hadn’t thought out what he wanted to say when face-to-face with the vampires. Either he hadn’t thought about it or he had been unable to decide while attempting to prepare himself. Either way, he was floundering.

Eventually, he settled on saying, “Would you like to explain to us what it is you’ve been hiding?”

It worked as well as anything else could have, I supposed. Although I liked to think that I could have come up with something better. Something more persuasive. Or at least something angrier.

Jacob had appeared strong-willed when we arrived. He’d looked the part of a confident alpha who had come to get answers and protect his pack. Now he seemed to be wilting when faced with his future in-laws. The family he had come to almost regard as his own, no matter how much it revolted me.

I also didn’t think that Nessie’s presence was helping. Perhaps that was why neither of her parents had tried to send her away. Her presence in the room was guaranteed to keep Jacob calm.

“I’m not sure-” Edward began, but he was cut off by the sudden growls of a handful of wolves. They were glaring at Edward, and Edward settled back into his seat, not interested in finishing his thought.

Even Bella had placed a hand on Edward’s arm as if censuring him, and that, perhaps, had been what had gotten him to shut up. Still, Bella didn’t glance in Edward’s direction. Her gaze remained on Jacob, steadier than it had been moments before.

“We’ll share the truth with you. All of it. You have our word.”

She glanced over at Edward. Edward nodded, but it was more reluctant than Bella’s eager agreement. An action only meant to please her or show his defeat. I was sure he had rationalized not telling us as being advantageous or safer somehow, but I had little doubt that the real reasoning was a continued prejudice toward us. One that he couldn’t shake despite who his future son-in-law was.

Nessie took the agreement to talk to mean that she could move without facing any reprimand. She scurried over to Jacob, closing the space between them before anyone had the chance to stop her. Jake reached for her out of instinct rather than thought. Embry shuffled closer to me to make room for her on the couch between him and Jake.

It was hard not to feel like Nessie had just chosen a side. Edward’s forehead creased in a frown deeper than the one that had been there since we’d arrived. He watched Nessie intently, as if his gaze alone would be enough to pull her back to the vampire side of the room.

The thought gave me a feeling of satisfaction, and I couldn’t help but smirk despite the mood that continued to permeate the room. Edward’s eyes didn’t flicker towards me, but I saw his jaw tighten. I doubted I was the only wolf who had watched what had happened with amusement, and Edward didn’t seem eager to draw further attention to it.

“Bella, Edward,” Jake said, bringing everyone else out of their disappointment or satisfaction. Edward’s eyes snapped to Jake from where he’d been watching Nessie. He offered Jake a tight smile.

“Are you going to explain it to us?” Jake asked.

His confidence had returned upon having his imprint by his side. It was like having her there was a comfort and also a reminder that he could protect her should any physical conflict break out.

After a long pause, Edward spoke, his voice clear and confident. “Alice has seen some developments in the Volturi’s plans.”

“How recent?” Jake answered, his scowl back. “How long have you been keeping secrets?”

Edward sighed, looking somewhat regretful. A feeling of dread had begun to take over my stomach as we waited to see where this was leading us, but I was the beta of this pack, and I’d known from the beginning that the position meant shouldering responsibilities. I couldn’t default on those responsibilities regardless of what my fears were, so I straightened my shoulders and fixed my gaze on the vampire, waiting to hear what he would tell us.

“They seem to be preparing for a sooner attack than we had anticipated.”

For the first time, there was a quiver of fear in Edward’s voice. I’d never seen him show fear in front of us, not even the last time we had faced the Volturi. I had no way of knowing what he had felt inside, but on the outside he had remained the poster child for cool, calm, and collected.

“How soon?” Jake asked, his voice trembling with fear.

Nessie, who hadn’t heard any of this before based on the wide-eyed look on her face, had shuffled closer to Jake’s side, and Jake kept one arm around her. I wasn’t sure who was comforting each other more.

The guys were looking around at each other with the same fear stricken look on their faces.

“Not tomorrow or even within the next year,” Edward assured us, but the confidence necessary for it to be effective was missing. “Alice believes that there is no way they could be ready in less than a year.”

“Not very comforting,” Jacob muttered.

“I know,” Edward said. “It’s not like it brings any to me either.”

For once, I was willing to believe him. If for no other reason than that I knew this was as terrifying for the Cullens as it was for us. Maybe it was even more so as they were the primary targets. As far as we could tell, we were merely caught in the crossfire.

Edward continued, “We plan to be long gone by the time an attack comes.” Jake pulled Nessie closer, a motion that didn’t go unnoticed by her parents. “Bella and I leave within the next six months.”

Nessie whimpered, burying her face in Jacob’s chest.

“And Nessie?” Jake asked. All thoughts of a potential attack had gone out the window now that he realized he was close to losing his imprint.

“She stays with you,” said Edward, “at least until after it’s over. Then we reassess what we’ll do.”

“We were going to mention it to you,” Bella said hesitantly. She knew that she had risked angering Jake to a point that she never had before.

“When?” Jake asked angrily. Bella cowered under his gaze, burrowing into Edward’s side in a manner not unlike how Nessie was pressing herself against Jake.

“Soon,” Bella replied, but we knew it was a useless answer. I figured from the look on Edward’s face that he had left the job of telling Jacob to Bella, and it had been Bella who had failed to do it before this. That didn’t make me feel any better than Edward, who was unlikely to have pushed Bella to do it when she showed reluctance.

“Well, thanks for that,” Jake replied.

“There is one other thing.” I could hear the regret in Edward’s voice that came from interrupting such a heated exchange, but he had the demeanor of someone who thought they had an important point to add.

“Having Nessie in La Push will make you more of a target than you would be otherwise,” Edward said. “She’s a rarity, and we know the Volturi want her. They want her more than the rest of us combined. I have no doubt they will attack us first in an effort to strip us of whatever power they imagine we possess.

“Our family has every intention of fighting back if cornered. If we win, then the battle is over. However, if we lose, if the Volturi kill us, then you will be become their next target.”

“Because of Nessie.”

Nessie shuddered as Jacob said the words. I’d never seen her this terrified in her life.

“Because of Nessie,” Edward confirmed. “I already know what actions you will take, but because of everything I’ve told you, Carlisle feels that it’s only polite that I offer-”

“Nessie will stay here,” Jake replied harshly. “She is my imprint, and we will protect her no matter what the risk.”

Edward nodded. Bella gave him a satisfied smile. They had known that was the decision Jacob would make, yet Nessie stared up at him in awe.

There was never an option. Every wolf who had observed the thoughts of an imprinted wolf knew that we would be tasked with Nessie’s protection.

“Very well,” Edward said with a note of finality. “Then Nessie stays here with you when Bella and I leave.”

Jake gave a short nod as Nessie’s first tears broke free. She tilted her eyes to the floor to hide her face. I was surprised that she didn’t move to cling to her parents and beg them to stay. I was certain that the Nessie of a year ago would have done just that. Now I could tell that she was steeling herself against the instinct. Almost as if she needed to prepare herself for the future heartbreak.

Bella and Edward did look saddened, but neither one of them looked likely to protest. Their eyes remained on their daughter. I wondered if they’d been vocal about letting her stay or reluctant. Part of me wanted to know, but none of me wanted to ask.

I remained quiet, as did most of the guys, for only a few minutes longer. Soon, everyone was filing out of the house. Jake gave me a look before I could follow, telling me that we needed to talk. I escaped to the front porch, not able to take the stench of the house any longer. Even outside, it was only slightly less potent.

“I feel like I’m suffocating,” I wheezed to Embry.

He rubbed my back though he couldn’t have been feeling better about it himself.

Jake stepped out the front door, having said his goodbyes to Nessie, and I made a beeline for the trees, needing to get as far away from the smell of vampire as I could before we talked. Jake and Embry followed me without complaint, and we breathed in deep as the smell become easier to handle.

“We’ll need to talk to Sam,” Jake said as we continued to walk in the direction of La Push. “As soon as possible too. I’m not letting him go off on me when he finds out I was keeping stuff from him.”

“Tomorrow,” I urged him. “Right now I need a shower. Please, let’s put off dealing with Sam until tomorrow.”

For a moment, I thought Jacob was going to argue, but as he thought about it, I could see the moment he changed his mind.

“Tomorrow,” he agreed. “It’s better that way. Gives me time to think about how to tell him or whatever.”

“You should work on that,” Embry joked. “Especially after the less than stellar impression you made in front of the vamps back there.”

Jake reached out and shoved Embry, almost sending him into a tree. He mumbled a few choice words as he began walking rapidly past Embry and me.

Embry smirked, proud of himself. I held back to wait for him. Recovering, he took my hand in his as we walked, running his thumb over my skin. Goosebumps erupted. I never managed to get used to the sensation of Embry’s skin on mine.

“You okay?” he asked, and I nodded, unable to summon enough energy to protest the question. I was at least as okay as Embry was, as okay as anyone could be after hearing what we had heard. I was okay enough to function, and that was as good as it was going to get while the Volturi were such a large and looming threat.

“I’m fine,” I responded. Embry gave me that look that made it evident that he didn’t believe me, but I did nothing except glance away, eyes roving around at the woods instead of looking at him. “As fine as I can be,” I acceded. “You?”

Embry sighed, looking away from me just like I had him. “The same I guess.”

I nodded. There was no other response that was adequate. Not that that response was adequate either. Suddenly, life felt terrifying again, and I didn’t have a desire to dwell upon it.

That didn’t stop it from being the one thing I thought about as I laid in bed and attempted to sleep that night.

**June 18th, 2010**

The next day came after a long night with no sleep, and the day itself dragged on even longer. I sat at my desk, struggling with all of my might to complete the work I was being paid to do.

I did make progress, but it wasn’t the same as I would have done on an average day. I kept zoning out, my sleeplessness from the night before catching up with me. I would stare at the computer screen or a sheet of paper for long stretches of time before I snapped back to reality.

The entire day was one long struggle, and the worst part was what it was leading up to.

I didn’t want to help Jacob tell Sam what had happened the day before. In fact, I dreaded it. I knew it was my duty as his beta. It was, perhaps, one of the most important duties I’d been given over the last several years, which meant I couldn’t back out, but that didn’t make me eager.

When I left the office that day, Jake sat outside of the building in his car. He was tapping his fingers against the wheel as I approached, lost in his own thoughts. Ones that I imagined were similar to those I’d been experiencing all day.

“Hey,” I greeted as I pulled the door open and got inside.

Jake’s mind was pulled away from where it had been. He nodded and provided me with his own greeting.

“Ready?” he asked.

I shook my head in an honest answer. “Ready to let Sam lose his temper with us when none of this is our fault? Not in the slightest.”

“Me either,” Jake agreed. He turned the key in the car, making the engine start.

I was quiet as we began our drive. It was the same route I took home every day. I’d seen it a million times, but not being the one driving meant I could inspect my surroundings in more detail.

Jacob began drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. I turned a sharp eye at him, hoping that would be enough to make him stop, but he didn’t notice.

“Jake,” I shot at him.

He was startled, and it took several moments for him to put together why I was glaring at him in the first place.

“Sorry,” he said, moving one of his hands away from the wheel as if that were necessary for him to avoid the temptation of doing it again. His other hand gripped the wheel tighter. There was a possibility that it would be deformed when he let go of it.

“So, did you plan what you’re going to say?” I asked, feeling the need to fill the silence to quell both of our fears.

Jake let out the air in his lungs. “I thought about it. I’m not sure that I actually came up with something.”

“Right. Of course not.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Clearwater. I’m glad that you believed in me.”

“Maybe I’d feel bad about it if you’d managed to prove me wrong.”

Jake shrugged as he began slowing down to turn into Sam and Emily’s driveway. The sight of the house had always filled me with dread in the past, but in recent years, that dread had died away and been replaced with something more akin to indifference.

Today, the dread had returned. My heart drummed in my chest as Jacob put the car in park. The house looked unassuming and unthreatening enough that I wanted to believe that I could be mistaken in worrying about what we were about to do.

“Did you check to make sure they’re home?” I asked, hand poised on the handle of the car door as I prepared to get out.

Jake nodded as he pushed his own door open. “Yeah, I called.”

I followed him out and let him lead the way to the door. Even postponing this by milliseconds was appealing. I wanted to believe that Sam would take the information we had to share in a calm and collected manner, but I already knew that was false hope. He would only be calm when it came to his own definition of that word.

Feeling like a hypocrite, I drummed my fingers against the porch railing as we waited for Emily or Sam to respond to Jacob’s knock. Emily, of course, was the one to pull the door open. She smiled at us, not a hint that she sensed that something was off.

“Come in, come in,” she urged us, stepping inside to let us into the house.

I tried to make myself smile, but I could feel how fake it felt. Like something I would have given her years ago. Shoving a baby toy out of the way, I took a spot beside Jake on the couch. Sam watched us as we settled in from his own spot across the room.

“Would you like anything to drink?” Emily asked, hovering about instead of taking her own seat.

Jake and I echoed each other with our refusals, and Emily hesitated like she might insist before she instead took a seat in the chair next to Sam’s. I fidgeted, looking at Jacob and expecting him to lead the way through this.

Before Jake could open his mouth though, Sam spoke up.

“What is it that you wanted to talk about?”

Jacob cleared his throat, and I could feel the nervous energy radiating off of him. His hands twitched before he clasped them together in an attempt to hide it.

There was little chance to avoid the fact that we were here to discuss something serious. I was sure Jake had given that much away when he had first called Sam. If he hadn’t, we sure were now with our nervous demeanors and reluctance to say what we had come here to say.

“We met with the Cullens yesterday,” I said, losing my patience while waiting for Jacob to speak. This would have to be like ripping off a band-aid. That was the only way we would manage it.

“The Cullens,” Sam repeated. His brow furrowed, and I was sure he was thinking about what such a meeting could have been about as he said the words. I saw a look of realization appear on his face, and I knew he had put it together without us having to explain, just like I’d known he would before we stepped foot in the house.

“The Volturi,” he stated. There was a note of anger in his voice, but it was tinged with fear. I knew he’d been waiting for this while the rest of us remained convinced that it would never have to be something that we would need to deal with. Sam was going to have a hell of a time with his I-told-you-sos.

After we survived that was.

Until shit went down with the Volturi, it was far more likely that he would be a hard ass. Working us to the bone while convinced that it was for our own good. I already knew how everything would play out.

Everything, that was, except the confrontation with the Volturi itself. That was the great unknown that hung over our heads, and it was that fear that left my stomach churning. I had a feeling that wasn’t going to stop for months. Or longer if we got it.

“The Volturi,” Jake replied. He had gained confidence now that Sam had come to the right conclusion on his own. He squared his shoulders and set his face in a stern expression. I thought, a little belatedly, that he might be trying to prove himself as a capable alpha to Sam after feeling like he’d failed at the beginning.

“Alice’s visions have changed,” Jacob continued, and I couldn’t help but notice that he left out the part about Alice’s visions having changed a while ago. He wasn’t going to tell Sam the whole truth about the Cullens hiding this information for as long as they did, and I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want Sam to know either.

“She doesn’t see the Volturi planning for hundreds of years. That’s why they’ve been-” Jake caught himself as if he’d been about to say something that he thought he shouldn’t. “That’s why Carlisle and Esme moved away too, and Bella and Edward are moving in a few months. They’re trying to make Forks and La Push less of a target. They’ll lure the Volturi to England instead.”

“And Nessie?” Sam asked, face tight in concentration. I noticed for the first time that Emily had taken hold of his hand and was gripping it tightly enough that her knuckles had turned white. I glanced up at her face, and when her eyes caught mine, they were wide with fear.

“Nessie stays here,” Jake said as if he were challenging Sam to say differently. He didn’t though. Of course he didn’t. If there was one thing Sam took more seriously than our mission to kill vampires, it was the imprint bond. He may have resented the fact that Jacob had imprinted on a half vampire, but he would never deny Nessie’s honored position of receiving full pack protection. No matter how much more dangerous that made things for the packs.

“Of course she does,” Sam said with a nod. “I expected that Bella and Edward would try to take her with them. I would have thought you’d have to fight them or that Bella would try to make you go with them.”

That last one had occurred to me as well. I’d almost expected it from Bella and had been surprised when she never brought it up as a possibility. She’d always cared about Jacob and not the rest of the wolves in either pack. It didn’t matter that Seth and I were her step siblings, so I never would have expected her to have any qualms about trying to lure our alpha away from La Push. She would have remained oblivious to the trouble that would cause us.

“They didn’t try either of those things.” Jake sounded offended that Sam had suggested it. He still got ruffled when anyone spoke out against Bella. I rolled my eyes. Now wasn’t the time to get up in arms about Sam stating something that could have easily happened. I elbowed Jake in the ribs to dissuade him from starting anything that I didn’t want to deal with.

“Good,” Sam replied, trying to stop a conflict as much as I was. “So Nessie stays here then.”

“Just so we’re clear.” Jake took a deep breath as if steadying himself. “The Volturi are enthralled with how unique Nessie is. They want to take out the Cullens because they’re a security threat, but they want Nessie alive. To study her like she’s some science experiment. I will do everything in my power to protect her, but having her here also makes us a bigger target.”

“Of course I know that,” Sam replied with a roll of his eyes. “We’ve known that your imprint on her was going to be a risk for us since we learned we were facing off against the Volturi the first time. We postponed that fight, but I, for one, always knew it was only being postponed. There’s nothing to be done about it. Nessie’s pack.”

Jacob’s shoulders sagged in relief, like he hadn’t been expecting Sam to affirm that fact readily.

Sam saw it too, and a flash of irritation passed by in his eyes. “What did you think I was going to do?” he asked. “Demand that she go with her parents? Demand that you take her somewhere else by yourself?”

Jake’s shoulders hunched over as if he were ashamed. “I thought about suggesting that second one myself actually.”

Sam leaned back as if forced to by the power of Jacob’s words. Emily and I stared at him in disbelief too. As soon as I’d regained my bearings, I slapped him on the arm.

“How idiotic are you?” I asked, using all the venom I could muster. “Do you want both of you to die? As if you would stand a chance against the Volturi by yourself. The packs fighting them is a dangerous risk, but what you’re suggesting is offering yourself and Nessie up as sacrifices.”

Jake shrunk away from me. “I wasn’t suggesting it,” he replied testily. “I said that I thought about suggesting it. I decided against it.”

“Good,” I replied, not sure what else to say. I was blown away that Jake had even thought about it. “You’re our goddamn alpha anyway. If you ever think about abandoning us in a situation like this again, then I’m killing you myself.”

Jacob breathed easier upon hearing my words.

“So,” Sam said after a moment of silence. “Nessie stays here, and we begin to prepare ourselves. We’ll need to have joint pack meetings obviously. A lot of them. And we’ll have to start training ourselves again. I only hope that the younger ones take it more seriously this time than they did the last.”

I doubted it, but I didn’t say as much out loud. I thought they’d take it less seriously this time. Now they were secure about being wolves and about their place in the pack. They had enough experience to think they would be able to handle themselves and not enough to grasp the full consequences of what was about to happen. They’d be unbearable.

Jake nodded in agreement. “My pack already knows. I expect you’ll want to tell yours soon.”

“Today if I can,” Sam said with a nod. “Then I’ll call you to discuss when we should be training.”

I wasn’t sure that it would be a discussion as much as it would be Sam demanding things of Jacob, but I also knew that Jacob would be fine with that. I could see him wilting under the pressure of preparing for this. He would want Sam to take on as much of the responsibility as he could, and I also knew that Sam would happily do so.

It frustrated me no matter how much I understood it.

But I held my tongue, knowing that it was what would happen, and it was the way both of them needed it to be in order to cope. It was going to be a long, terrifying wait, and I didn’t relish the idea of getting worked up about anything that wasn’t life or death.

Not when life or death was in the forefront of my mind, scaring me shitless.


	7. July

**July 8th, 2010**

_Moses, if you try to pull that shit on me one more time._ A growl formed deep in Jake’s throat, and he hunched over menacingly as a wolf to punctuate the thought. Moses didn’t react how Jacob wanted him to, but he had no choice but to bow to his alpha. He would take Jake seriously for five minutes before this happened all over again. He always came back around to treating their training like a joke.

It had happened over and over, and each time, Jacob lost more of his patience. He had yet to use an alpha command in one of the sessions, still clinging onto his dislike for them, but I knew it was only a matter of time. Eventually, the stress of it all and the continued frustration would get to him. He would crack, and he would alpha order one of the guys to do something. I wouldn’t be surprised is some minor injuries were involved.

After that, maybe the young wolves would take the whole thing seriously, but I wasn’t sure how seriously given the close to zero fucks they currently gave. It would take Jake letting loose on them to make much of a difference.

I’d already noticed that everyone took the training seriously when Sam was around. I was willing to bet that no one in his pack acted out when they did solo pack training sessions either. Sam was more of an authoritarian than Jake. They said and did almost the exact same thing, something that I knew was purposeful on Jacob’s part, but for whatever reason, the actions held more power when they came from Sam.

Sam had a commanding personality that Jacob had failed to grasp, and I could only guess that it came from Jacob’s continued reluctance to command others. I was also sure that he knew the same thing, but it hadn’t yet helped him overcome the problem.

 _Yeah, got it, Jake_ , Moses replied, sounding slightly regretful. That had everything to do with being reprimanded, not true remorse for his actions.

I growled at him in what I knew was a pointless attempt at backing Jake up. It always fell on me to play the bad cop to his good cop. Typically, I was in my element completing the role, loving the responsibility of being the tough one.

These days it was harder. The continual stress of the future was getting to me as much as it was everyone else, and it was becoming impossible to be tough when what I wanted was to curl up in a ball in a dark room and hide from reality.

It was particularly difficult to hide that desire when the entire pack was in my head and we had to fight together as if our lives depended on it. And I was aware of just how much our lives depended on it.

As it turned out, I was right about Moses refusing to take Jacob seriously. He soon got a nip in the side from Jake after making an unwise comment.

 _Let’s call it a day_ , I suggested as Moses cowered in submission after being reprimanded. Jake growled at me, and for a second, I thought he would disagree. _We’ve been at it for two hours_ , I pointed out. _That’s long enough for today. Maybe too long. We’re tired, Jacob, and a certain someone is only going to get more unbearable if you make us keep going._

There was another growl from Jake, but this one wasn’t directed at me. It was an announcement of his annoyance with each of us. 

_Yeah, okay_ , he agreed before turning to Moses again. The young wolf shivered in fear, bowing his head before Jake could relay a thought to us. _Just don’t think this means that you can goof off and get out of training in the future_ , Jake told him, authority seeping through his voice. _We’re only quitting because it’s been long enough. You try anything next time, and I swear to God, Moses._

He didn’t threaten Moses with a specific action, but for once, I didn’t think he needed to. His anger was showing enough that Moses took him seriously. At least for the moment. He bowed his head and backed away from Jake, heading for the trees where he could phase back in privacy.

I didn’t wait around for Jake to shift his focus to me. I didn’t need an alpha-beta talk like he’d forced on me many other times after these sessions. They never amounted to anything more than Jake releasing his frustration onto me, and while I got that he needed a release, I was tired of being the one he thrust his anger onto. He could find someone else today.

There was a cluster of bushes not far from where we trained. I’d claimed it as my own, phasing in and out within its protection each time. In the past, I would have run home and phased there instead, but it hadn’t taken long for me to learn that I would want out of everyone’s heads as soon as possible once our training sessions were complete.

Embry was waiting for me when I came out of the bushes. He stepped forward as I struggled to get the twigs out of my hair. Brushing my hands away, he took up the job himself, allowing me to focus my attention on brushing the dirt off my clothes.

“I’m exhausted,” Embry said, pulling the last twig from my hair. “We can’t keep doing this three times a week.”

“Remember that Sam wanted it to be every day.”

Embry groaned, and I could tell it wasn’t exaggerated. After going through what we’d been forced to endure, the idea of doing the same thing more often was horrendous.

“It would be easier to become a Navy SEAL,” Embry complained. “At least they’d pay me.”

I took his hand in mine. It was partially to offer him comfort, but I also felt better having extra support as we walked through the forest. I wasn’t sure that I could make it by myself. It shouldn’t have been possible to be this worn out as a wolf. For years, I’d been able to avoid feeling physically exhausted at this level.

“The Navy would be safer too,” I whispered. The thought sent a shiver of fear down my spine. It was difficult to think of what loomed over us, and it was rare for me to reference the danger directly.

Embry’s hand tightened around mine for a second as he took in my words. I glanced up to see his clenched jaw and a determined glint in his eyes, but he didn’t voice a response to what I had said. He wouldn’t. Embry, who loved to discuss everything he thought about, was even more reluctant to discuss the future than I was, and that was saying something.

It scared me as much as everything else did. I didn’t like how Embry changed anytime we went near the topic of the Volturi, and we seemed to always be near the topic of the Volturi these days.

“Has what’s-his-face got his fish tank yet?” Embry asked instead, trying to get us thinking about anything but the Volturi.

It wouldn’t work. It never worked, but I smiled up at Embry anyway and answered, trying to humor him. We could pretend it had worked for a few hours.

**July 16th, 2010**

Walking into Sam and Emily’s house these days felt like going to a zoo and stepping right into one of the exhibits. Between the infant and the toddler, there was always more than enough noise and more than enough mess throughout the house.

Emily wasn’t one of the obsessive cleaning types, like the kind who always had to have everything spotless, but she had always been on top of the usual household chores, not letting anything go too long without being cleaned.

Not anymore. Taking care of two kids had put the types of cleaning that wasn’t cleaning the kids themselves on a back burner.

It wasn’t that their house was a pig sty. It retained its livability, but it was also cluttered, and you had to watch your step to make sure you didn’t trip over one of the toys that littered the floor.

All in all, it wasn’t that bad of an atmosphere for a house to have, but I wasn’t used to it. With how hectic life had been—leaving little time for anything that wasn’t work, training, or Embry—I felt less familiar with it. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that I had no idea when the last time I’d stepped foot into Sam and Emily’s house had been other than that day Jacob and I had come to break our terrible news.

“Sorry about the mess,” Emily told me as she ushered me towards the couch, kicking a stuffed animal out of the way in the process. She sounded out of breath.

I smiled at Kim, who already occupied the couch, a cup of tea cradled in her hands.

“Would you like something to drink?” Emily asked, pausing long enough to pick up several cardboard books from the coffee table.

“Just some water would be fine,” I told her, and she hurried off into the kitchen.

I let out a long breath as she left.

“I know,” Kim said. “Watching her makes you feel tired.”

I nodded, but I also couldn’t help but grin. “She’s in her element though, isn’t she?” I asked. “This sort of thing is what she’s always wanted.”

Kim’s smile grew, and she began to look less awkward than she had when I first sat down. It always took Kim a few moments to warm up to me each time I saw her again. I never understood why, but I’d accepted that it was the way things were between us. She would always be nervous until I showed to her that I wasn’t about to bite.

“It is,” she agreed. “It’s nice.”

“What’s nice?” Emily asked, hurrying back into the room with my glass of water. She speed walked as she came towards us, and I almost wanted to remind her that she could slow down. Sam had the kids tonight, and I wasn’t a toddler who was demanding something as soon as possible. Emily seemed to have reverted to only working at one speed.

“This,” Kim said, motioning around at the house.

Emily raised an eyebrow, not looking amused. “The house?” she asked in disbelief. “The house is a mess. Look at the place. I didn’t even have time to pick up the toys before you got here. I don’t know if I want to let you see the kitchen sink.”

Kim and I laughed.

“Of course it’s messy,” Kim said. “You have two kids. I think it would be unnatural if it wasn’t. That’s what’s nice about it.”

Emily looked at her as if she’d gone crazy. “You can’t be serious. It’s driving me insane. At first I could handle it because it wasn’t that bad, but it’s starting to get to the point where I find it embarrassing. There has to be some secret I’m missing that would give me enough time to clean.”

Kim laughed again. “Seriously, Emily. Don’t worry about it so much. The house is fine. It’s nowhere near being a health hazard, which means it’s fine.”

Emily threw Kim a disbelieving look, but she didn’t argue. Instead, she turned to me as if she expected me to say something next. Based off her expression alone, I thought that she expected me to contradict everything Kim had said, to trash the house and call Emily incompetent.

“It really is fine,” I said instead. “Neater than I would have it in your shoes.”

“You work though,” Emily pointed out. “I’d understand then, but I’m a stay-at-home mom who can’t keep the house picked up. That’s what makes it pathetic.”

I rolled my eyes. “Stop being so down on yourself. It makes you annoying.”

Emily frowned at that, but she stopped talking negatively about either herself or the house. I watched the gears in her head turn for several moments as she struggled with accepting what we had said to her, and then her expression brightened as her eyes landed back on Kim.

“How’s married life going then?” Emily asked. She sounded joyful to be asking the question, like her and Kim hadn’t had ample opportunities to talk since the wedding. I would have been surprised if she hadn’t asked Kim that exact question multiple times.

That didn’t stop a blush from spreading across Kim’s face. Her shoulders hunched over as she made herself smaller. “Good,” she replied in a timid voice.

I had to stop myself from sighing. Sometimes Kim’s continued shyness, no matter how long we had known her, got to be too much for me to deal with without a few not so nice thoughts running through my head, but I was getting better about biting my tongue and not saying the thoughts out loud. One might have thought that I’d never had the thoughts at all.

“Any news on the baby front?” Emily asked, bouncing in her seat.

My eyes widened as I looked between the two of them. I hadn’t expected Emily to boldly ask such a question, although I didn’t know what either of them had said to each other on the topic before. Kim certainly looked bashful about discussing it, although I didn’t know if that was because of the question itself or because I was present.

“Same as last time you asked,” Kim said in a whisper.

I fought the urge to glare at Emily. I didn’t like how this sounded, like Emily had been pressuring Kim to talk about something personal. But of course she would have. Emily did, after all, consider children to be a given when it came to imprinted couples, so it made sense that she would be counting down the days until Kim was pregnant.

I was just surprised that she had worded it so boldly. Emily wasn’t one to go against expected manners. The only exceptions seemed to be topics that related to imprinting. Then Emily turned into one of the rudest people I knew.

“I don’t understand-”

“It doesn’t feel like a good time.”

I had a good idea of what Emily had been about to say before Kim interrupted her, and I thought Kim had made a good choice in ending it before she could continue. Still, I didn’t like that she was explaining herself at all. Emily didn’t deserve that explanation, yet I couldn’t help but be interested in whatever information Kim was going to offer up. I listened with rapt attention as she continued.

“I haven’t even finished my apprenticeship, Emily. Now’s not the time for me to be getting pregnant. We need a few years. I need to get settled into my job. We need to save up.”

“You have enough,” Emily proclaimed. “I’m sure of it.”

If it hadn’t been out of line, I would have asked Emily if she knew what Jared and Kim’s income was. The truly sad thing was that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had declared that she did. In her quest for Kim to become a mother, she would gather all the information at her disposal.

Kim shrugged. “We could make it work if we wanted to. I know that, but we feel better about waiting until my apprenticeship is over at least.”

“Why though?” Emily asked, sounding truly confused. “What difference does it make if you’re doing the work as an apprentice or not? It’s the same work.”

Kim fumbled over finding the right words to defend herself. That was, after all, not her strong suit. I could tell that she was about to collapse under the pressure. It made me fear that she’d get pregnant as soon as possible just to shut Emily up.

Actually, the more I thought about that possibility, the more it terrified me. It seemed to hit close to home after everything that had gone down between Emily and Rachel. Their relationship had yet to recover. They were civil towards each other, but they could only be considered friends in the broadest sense of the term.

Thinking about that made me wonder if her increased insistence when it came to Kim and Jared’s relationship had to do with her continued panic over Rachel and Paul’s. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Kim was receiving some of the backlash that Emily couldn’t throw at Rachel when she was all the way in Seattle.

“What does it matter?” I asked.

Emily turned to me, eyes wide as if she were surprised that I had spoken up. “What?” she asked.

“What does it matter?” I repeated. “If Kim and Jared have kids now or later, what does it matter?”

Emily was taken aback as if the question had never occurred to her. She stumbled over her words, not able to settle on anything long enough to get a complete sentence out. I looked away from her and in Kim’s direction, taking in the way the younger woman fidgeted. She didn’t like that a conflict had begun brewing with her at the center. I knew that was why she’d put up with Emily’s questioning in the first place, but that only made it bother me more than it would have otherwise.

“I just want-”

“But what you want doesn’t matter. Does it, Emily?” I asked, shutting her up. “It’s Jared’s and Kim’s lives. It’s what they want that matters.”

Emily and Kim both gaped at me, shocked that I’d gotten passionate about Kim’s life. They shouldn’t have been though. I’d been growing fed up with Emily’s facade of wishing everyone the best that was only a disguise for her trying to force her own views onto everyone else. I had been since that first time she confronted Rachel. I was sick and tired of putting up with it, and I wasn’t about to sit there when I knew Kim would do nothing to defend herself.

No answer came from Emily. After a minute of struggling to speak, she snapped her mouth shut, gazing at me with more intensity than before, but she also didn’t argue. Somehow, she had accepted that she wasn’t going to get anywhere. Not with me and Kim. So she didn’t put up a fight.

“Right,” she said. More, I thought, out of an attempt to get rid of the tension in the air than because she agreed. “It’s a decision for Kim and Jared. Of course I know that.”

Her voice revealed how offended she felt, like I should be ashamed at myself for suggesting that Emily hadn’t known that, but I wasn’t. Within Emily’s answer I found more evidence that she hadn’t stopped to think about that even if, on some level, she had known it.

I glanced at Kim one more time, and she smiled at me when Emily wasn’t looking. At least that was something. It made me feel less like a terrible person for taking the situation out of her hands. In a way, I had done exactly what Emily had been trying to do, but I would have felt worse about it if I hadn’t been sure that I had done what was right.

Kim was sure to tell Jared about this. As an imprint, there was no way she wouldn’t. Actually, Emily was sure to tell Sam too. A consequence that I should have been more worried about. Jared was sure to tease me about it, but considering everything happening, I couldn’t feel much annoyance about that.

“I feel bad about it, you know?”

My eyes shot to Emily, surprised by her words. My brow wrinkled in confusion. “What are you talking about?” I asked. I glanced over at Kim to make sure that she didn’t understand any better than I did, and I saw the expression on my face reflected in her own. It was clear from the way Emily spoke that she wasn’t apologizing for what had just happened. She was addressing me, not Kim, despite the way she looked at neither of us. This was about something different.

“Rachel,” Emily said. There was sadness in her voice. “I regret what I said. It was such a long time ago, but I know that she hasn’t forgiven me for it.”

Emily looked at me as if I could provide reassurance that she hadn’t yet received from Rachel herself. I floundered, not knowing how to respond. I couldn’t forgive Emily in Rachel’s place like Emily wanted me to. That wasn’t possible.

Even if I did have that authority, I wouldn’t have provided it.

“That’s good, but I don’t think I’m the one you need to be saying that to.” While I wanted to encourage her to talk to Rachel, the words came out laced with anger. Emily flinched at them, glancing down at the ground.

“I know,” she admitted, a desperate whine to her voice. “And I’ve tried over and over again, but I can never get the words out whenever I talk to her. It never seems like the right time.”

That was strange coming from Emily who was usually eager to apologize. God knew that she’d apologized to me more times than anyone should have to take as our friendship fell apart after Sam imprinted on her. Emily was so apologetic that I couldn’t stand it, so what was it about this that made her incapable of it?

“I don’t think this is something there is a right time for,” I said. “It’s something you do because you have to.”

“I know,” Emily repeated.

It made me angry even though part of me felt like I should give her a break. This was, after all, just about the only thing I’d seen her act this way over, which left me thinking there was more going on with her than I was privy to. I was almost as curious as I was pissed off.

“Then why haven’t you done it?” This time it had been Kim who asked, and I had to admit that I was surprised to hear her ask such a question when she usually did everything in her power to extricate herself from conflict. And she would have considered an inability to choose what to eat for dinner to be a conflict.

Emily was thrown off by Kim’s question as well, struggling to provide an answer though she had to have expected the same question to come from me.

“Like I said, I never feel like I can do it when she’s in front of me.”

“You could write a letter,” Kim replied. She said it with such seriousness that it threw me off. Who wrote letters? The thought of it befuddled me. Rachel had been in her apartment for the better part of a year, and I couldn’t have told you what her address was. I didn’t need it. Not once had I considered sending her anything through the mail.

“A letter?” Emily asked, sounding as thrown off by the suggestion as I was. “I hadn’t thought about that. Would that be a good idea? It might be easier.”

“It’s what I would do. My mom made me do it when I was a kid. I’d get in fights with my friends, and I wouldn’t want to apologize because I was scared. So my mom would make me write a letter. When I was really young, she’d write them down as I composed them, and then she made me start writing them myself. But I always did it, even as late as high school, because I preferred it over doing it face-to-face.

“I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” she admitted, “but if you can’t apologize to Rachel’s face either, then maybe a letter would help.”

Emily looked deep in thought, nodding along unconsciously to Kim’s words.

“A letter could work,” she muttered to herself. “At the very least, it would help me figure out what it is I want to say, right?”

She looked up at us for approval. We both nodded at her, Kim with a smile.

“It would,” Kim assured her. Her face was bright, happy that Emily had taken her suggestion.

I was less enthusiastic about the whole thing, but I had to admit, “It might help. It’s better than nothing.”

In my mind, I could picture Rachel receiving the letter and not bothering to read it, but I didn’t voice that possibility. There wasn’t that bad of a chance that she would take the time to open it, even if she only skimmed over the words. Maybe it wouldn’t help solve anything, but who was I to stop Emily from trying?

“I’m going to do it,” Emily declared. She looked around the room as if searching for something. “Maybe I should do it now, since Sam has the kids. I won’t be able to think while they’re around.” She looked conflicted as her eyes flickered between Kim and me.

“It’s fine,” I assured her. “I need to go anyway. Go ahead and write your letter.”

Emily smiled at me as I left, Kim trailing along behind me, but I wasn’t doing her a favor. I was relieved to have gotten out of there.

What I wasn’t as excited about was that I had no choice but to walk with Kim as we headed in the direction of both of our houses. There was no way out of that one without looking like an asshole.

While I was fine walking in silence, that seemed to make Kim uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure why. In the past, I had been fine spending time with Kim precisely because she, more than almost anyone, was fine letting us exist in silence. For whatever reason, that wasn’t happening tonight. Maybe it was part of the high of having someone take a suggestion she had cared about.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” she asked, a bounce to her step as she walked. “I’d love if Emily and Rachel made up with each other.”

I hummed in agreement. It would be nice, but Kim sounded more optimistic than me about the possibilities of such a thing happening. I didn’t want to say as much and shatter her bubble.

“I hate when there’s awkwardness between us, you know?”

Kim was searching for answers from me that were more than a short noise or word, but she was asking the wrong questions for that. I sighed, taking pity on her.

“Yeah, it’s annoying,” I said, but I couldn’t add more when there was nothing to say about it.

Kim nodded in agreement, and I knew she was trying to decide what question was her next best bet.

“Do you think it will work?” she asked. This time she was nervous, fiddling with the hem of her shirt as she said it.

I sighed. This was the exact answer that I didn’t want to give. Not when I knew Kim wanted me to approve of her suggestion. “It might,” I allowed, figuring that was a positive enough answer that it wouldn’t bother her too much. “You never know, but it stands at least as good a chance as Emily talking to her would.”

Kim gave me a tight smile, accepting the answer without comment.

We arrived at her and Jared’s house soon enough that I didn’t have to deal with her saying anything else.

Continuing on the rest of the way home on my own, I tugged my phone out of my pocket and pulled up the messages I had last exchanged with Rachel.

 **Fair warning: Letter from Emily in mail soon** , I sent.

I wasn’t sure what kind of response I was going to get, but I wasn’t surprised when my phone vibrated in my hand and I looked down to see **shit** across the screen.

**July 26th, 2010**

I’d prepared myself to fight today. Not that I had to prepare myself for it anymore. It was more like I was in a constant state of preparedness, like Sam and Jacob wanted.

Maybe going into the forest and going through various fight moves night after night had become second nature, but having to sit down and talk felt exhausting.

I didn’t like this sort of thing on a good day. Listening to others go on and on angrily was always more than I wanted to deal with, but it was even more draining when you were physically exhausted.

It didn’t help that the physical exhaustion also meant that everyone’s tempers were short these days.

Sometimes, we felt like capable fighters. More often, I felt like I was in charge of a bunch of high school boys.

Which, I always realized belatedly, I was. High school boys who I was convinced were more prone to anger than the average high school boy, whether that was a side effect of being a wolf or a side effect of being forced to endure fight training multiple days a week.

“We’re going to have a serious talk,” Jacob said as he paced back and forth at the front of the living room.

Our entire pack had packed itself into the living room of Embry, Jake, and Quil’s apartment. I’d been the first to arrive other than the three who lived here, and I’d realized since then that Jake was adamant about appearing like Mr. Tough Guy at this thing.

He kept shooting the boys disapproving looks each time they so much as twitched, and for once, they remained quiet as if sensing that doing differently would result in punishment.

It was so unlike the Jacob of the past yet truthful to who Jacob was becoming as we continued with our training.

“You’re not taking this seriously enough,” Jake continued.

I got the sense as he talked that at least some of this had come from Sam. I wondered if Jacob had went and asked for advice on how to deal with the situation or if Sam had offered it without any prompting. At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised by either.

“I don’t feel like this should need to be repeated, but the Volturi are the most intimidating group of vampires in the world. Fighting them would be the hardest fight we could face as wolves. The training we’re doing isn’t for fun. It’s crucial for our survival. Do I need to remind you that a failure to take this seriously could result in your death?”

Each of the younger boys had their eyes averted towards the floor. Only Embry, Quil, Seth, and I dared to look at the others. From the looks on the boys’ faces, I could tell that they were fearful. Whether or not that fear had been newly instilled by Jake or had only been reawakened after laying dormant in the back of their minds I wasn’t sure.

Either way, Jacob had managed what he had hoped to accomplish. For the moment. I was still unable to believe that he would manage to change their attitudes towards the training for the long haul.

“From now on there will be no goofing off during training. I mean it. Or else.”

Jake had no idea how he would back up that threat. That was why he hadn’t specified a punishment. He didn’t have one, and he was hoping that they’d be scared enough that he wouldn’t have to come up with one.

I rolled my eyes but stayed quiet. Part of me wished that Jake had discussed that part of his speech with me ahead of time. I was sure that I could have come up with consequences if he couldn’t have, but saying as much now would ruin the effectiveness of what he was trying to achieve.

The boys nodded their heads. I was the only member of the pack who didn’t bother to respond. As beta, I’d already been in charge of helping coral the pack. I wasn’t who this speech was directed towards. Jake had narrowed his gaze onto the two biggest troublemakers in the pack: Moses and Robbie, who could often be found goofing off together during training sessions.

“Tomorrow we’ll have our training session like always,” Jake continued once he was certain that no one was going to try to disagree with him. “If any of you try to pull something…”

He once again left the consequences up to their imagination.

The boys mumbled their acknowledgment. While it was typically a given that the guys would stick around and talk with each other after a pack gathering, today they dispersed quickly, trying to get away from Jake.

“Nice job,” Embry told Jacob when the others, excluding Quil, had all left. He sounded amused by what he’d witnessed. “Effective,” he said with a smirk.

Quil snorted. I knew that the only thing keeping him in line during training sessions was living in the same apartment as Jacob. He couldn’t afford to keep his roommate pissed off, but the fact that the talk hadn’t been directed at him seemed to have given him enough confidence to joke about it.

“Think Moses pissed his pants,” Quil quipped.

Jake rolled his eyes, heading for the kitchen instead of offering Quil or Embry a response. Embry and Quil both shared a look, questioning each other about what was up with their best friend. Neither of them seemed to have an answer. Quil even offered an exaggerated shrug.

I got it though. I got it too well.


	8. August

**August 14th, 2010**

Rachel and Emily weren’t the only couple still treading on eggshells with each other. Although I didn’t like comparing my own friendships to that mess, Joselyn and I had never recovered from that day she had accused me of becoming distant from Embry.

I wasn’t mad at her, and neither one of us had brought it up since, but that felt like part of the problem. There was something strange between us that had never been there before, and it made me worry more than I ever had about how long our friendship could last.

At the same time, I felt desperate to make it last as long as possible, which was why I was determined to visit Joselyn in Port Angeles no matter how difficult it was for us to coordinate our schedules.

It was harder to disguise my lack of a car when I had to park in Joselyn’s apartment complex’s lot, which meant I had to drive instead of run. What had felt like a typical day’s journey during my college days now felt like a hassle. I spent the drive tapping my fingers against the wheel, wanting nothing more than to already be there.

Yet, when I arrived, I felt anxious about knocking on the door.

It had been far too long since I had seen Joselyn in person. That was only made worse by the knowledge that she and Embry still saw each other every weekday. (Not that I was bitter about it.) Texting wasn’t the same. Seeing each other face to face was nerve-wracking in comparison.

There wasn’t long to wait after working myself up to knock. Joselyn tugged the door open, all smiles as she ushered me inside. The door hadn’t fallen shut before her arms were around me.

“It’s so good to see you,” she mumbled into my shoulder.

“Good to see you too,” I responded, my words muffled by Joselyn’s shirt.

We pulled apart, and I felt a twinge of regret that was strange. Hugs and the like felt foreign to me. I avoided them at all costs, so the idea that I regretted pulling away from Joselyn was new. Especially when we had never been a touchy feely pair of friends.

“Come in, come in,” she urged, leading me further into the apartment.

The place was well-lived in. That was obvious from the way clutter filled every surface, whether it was in the kitchen or the living room. I felt another wave of regret. This time it was over the lack of visits I’d had to this place. It was obvious from a quick glance how comfortable and settled in Joselyn was here, but I’d only been to my best friend’s home twice before.

That left me feeling like an alien in the space, a feeling that I didn’t just dislike but abhorred. It did nothing to quench my fears of us growing apart.

“What do you think?” Joselyn asked, all smiles. I thought of that phone call months ago where we had gotten into our only argument to date. While that had been the only time I had heard Joselyn angry, those words had been turning themselves over in my mind since. It hadn’t mattered how many subsequent times I had talked to Joselyn on the phone.

Now that she was in front of me and I could see the usual bright demeanor along with the words, my old vision of Joselyn was beginning to return. Finally, I could view her as the cheerful yet often snarky girl that I knew and loved.

That quenched a fraction of my fears. Joselyn wasn’t the type to dump friends, but then again, it wasn’t a fear of being dumped that weighed on my conscious per se.

No, it was a fear of growing apart, and that seemed as likely with Joselyn as it did with anyone else. Growing apart happened despite anyone’s intentions. Nothing about Joselyn’s friendly personality would be able to prevent it if it was what was meant to happen.

The clattering of silverware against the counter surface startled me out of my thoughts. I glanced over at Joselyn, who was standing in the kitchen that was little more than counter space attached to the living room. She was fixing two mugs of what I would assume was coffee despite it being the afternoon.

I wondered how long I had zoned out and if I’d had that frown on my face that always seemed to alert those that paid attention—and Joselyn was one of few people who paid attention—that I was thinking less than pleasant thoughts.

I struggled to put a smile on my face before Joselyn turned back around with both mugs in hand. It must have worked because she didn’t act like anything was off as she handed me my coffee and urged me to take a seat on the couch.

“How are things?” she asked.

Joselyn was the only person I knew who could ask that question and sound like she wanted to hear the answer.

“Fine,” I responded. The brevity of the answer didn’t make it less true. “Nothing new. Just more of the same every day. It’s not bad. It’s familiar, and for the most part, I like it. But my life’s not interesting.”

I always felt pathetic when I said that. It made me feel like more of an adult, especially when I talked to Joselyn or Embry.

It was weird if I stopped to think about it. Joselyn went to classes each day, and despite an alternating schedule during the week, it wasn’t, in theory, that different from my workday. They sat there in class and learned.

My own workday shouldn’t have felt pathetic in comparison, but I couldn’t shake the embarrassment that came from my daily life being different from Joselyn’s. So different from what mine had been when we met.

I’d become a boring adult while Joselyn was still in the middle of what was supposed to be a fun, carefree time of life. I didn’t want to reveal how much we were on different wavelengths.

“I get it,” Joselyn said. “I feel the same way about my job.”

There was no reason why Joselyn’s attempt to empathize with me should have irked me, but it did. It felt like a fake and shallow attempt at maintaining familiarity.

Joselyn may have had a job, but it was a part time one. She was a student above anything else. I doubted that she would have challenged that distinction, which was why I didn’t understand why her drawing a parallel between her job and mine pissed me off.

I just knew that it did, and I kind of hated myself for it.

I tried to smile at Joselyn, but it came out looking wrong judging by the uneasy look on Joselyn’s face. Feeling self-conscious, I let the smile slip from my lips.

“How’s school?” I asked in a terrible attempt at changing the subject and getting back to a safer topic. Not that I could discuss college without feeling the same conflicting emotions that had arisen while discussing work.

“Same as always,” Joselyn replied. It was as if she knew that she should avoid talking about it. I didn’t like that either, although I knew that I was sinking into the terrible habit of being unsatisfied by everything.

“Leah, what’s up with you?” Joselyn asked instead of saying anything more about school.

I turned my body away from her, not wanting to have this conversation, but I knew that it was impossible to avoid it forever. That hadn’t worked over the phone, and it wouldn’t work when Joselyn could see every emotion on my face.

“I just-” I stopped, struggling to figure out what it was that I wanted to say. “It’s more of what I said that day over the phone,” I admitted.

“You’re worried that things will become strange between us,” Joselyn clarified.

Instead of responding verbally, I nodded. That was easier. Easier than trying to describe the feelings that I knew were irrational.

Joselyn sighed and scooted closer to me on the couch, placing a hand on my shoulder. I flinched away for a second before getting myself under control and relaxing.

“Leah,” Joselyn said softly, “you shouldn’t be worried about that. We’re fine. Look at us now.”

“Is that the best reassurance?”

Joselyn sighed again, flopping back against the couch.

“I guess not, but I think our friendship should be enough of a reassurance. We’ve been best friends for years, Leah. That’s not going to change.”

“You realize that Emily could have said that exact same thing to me at one point. Look at the two of us now.”

“Look.” Joselyn’s voice was stern enough to make me snap to attention. “I still don’t understand what happened between you and Emily. I get the whole thing about how she’s married to your former boyfriend, even though I’ve never gotten the full story on how that happened. But you can’t compare our friendship with that one. They’re different.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?” Joselyn asked. “Because, if you did, then I would have thought you’d have more faith in me. It seems kind of ridiculous that you would worry about us growing apart when there’s no reason to. Not unless you keep connecting me to Emily in your mind.”

“I-I-” I couldn’t get any words out. Joselyn’s statement had managed to strike a chord with me. “Maybe that’s true,” I admitted. There were no other excuses or explanations.

Joselyn gave a short nod like she’s already ascertained that she had to be correct. “And would it be out of place for me to suggest that you’re distancing yourself from Embry for the same reasons?”

My eyes widened as I gaped at Joselyn. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, not able to summon up the energy to control the venom in my voice.

“You’re connecting Embry to Sam,” Joselyn stated as if it were little more than simple fact. “Just like you connected me to Emily. You admitted you had feelings for him, and you allowed yourself to be with him. Now you’re screwing it up because you’ve started panicking again. You’re scared our friendship will end like yours and Emily’s. You’re scared your relationship with Embry will end like your relationship with Sam.

“It took me a long time to put that together, but I get it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I bit out at her.

“It is,” she agreed. “That doesn’t make it less true.”

“Fuck you,” I spat at her.

In some rational part in the back of my mind, I was trying to convince myself to stop, but the rest of my brain wasn’t willing to listen. I felt so angry that I couldn’t stop to think before I spoke. “I’m not worried about any of that. I’m not delusional. I know that our friendship is different than mine and Emily’s ever was, and I sure as hell know that my relationship with Embry is nothing like my relationship with Sam.”

“You know it on a rational level, but that doesn’t mean that’s not where your fear is coming from.”

I stood up, feeling the blood rush to my head. Joselyn remained seated, trying to appear calm although I could see how this argument was affecting her in her eyes.

“Stop psychoanalyzing me,” I demanded.

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then what the hell would you call it?”

Joselyn repositioned herself on the couch before answering. “I’m observing my best friend, and I’m making conclusions like this because I know you, Leah. I’ve figured out how your mind works.”

“And you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m some paranoid freak?”

Joselyn’s lack of an immediate response said everything that needed to be said. I let out a growl of frustration and began making my way towards the door.

“Leah,” Joselyn called from behind me, standing up from the couch. “That’s not what I was saying, Leah.”

I twirled back around when I was less than a foot from the door, glaring at Joselyn. Never before had I been thankful for the extra height I had been afforded in comparison to her.

“Then what could you have possibly meant?”

She struggled to come up with an answer. When she did talk, it was to say, “I’m trying to help.”

I snorted, crossing my arms against my chest. “This is a shit way to show it then. I’m not crazy or something.”

“That’s not what I said,” Joselyn insisted, sounding more offended than she had during any of the previous moments of our arguing.

“It’s what it sounded like,” I responded. There was a nagging worry in the back of my mind that I was beginning to sound like a petulant five-year-old, but the roar of anger in my ears was enough to prevent me from focusing too much on that worry. “Everything is fine with me,” I continued. “I’m not some fragile doll about to break.”

“I’m not the one treating you like a china doll, Leah. You’re treating yourself like that.”

I couldn’t take this anymore. Not if I wanted to prevent myself from doing something I would deeply regret. Memories of Emily’s scars flashed through my mind like they always did whenever I got this angry around someone. A constant reminder of why I couldn’t have this fight with Joselyn. No matter how much I wanted to continue this, to get my point across until she understood, it wasn’t worth hurting her or, God forbid, killing her.

“Fuck you,” I growled one last time. I spun around towards the door, not listening this time as Joselyn continued to call my name.

By the time I made it to the parking lot of Joselyn’s apartment building, I knew that I couldn’t get in my car. My entire body was vibrating. It had been years since I’d come this close to phasing through anger alone.

I kept going past my car and out of the parking lot, not caring if Joselyn was looking out a window and saw me. I could deal with whatever suspicions she had built up later. Right now I had to get out of sight.

I was used to having the woods around for shelter during moments like these. When I’d been coming to school in Port Angeles, I had never had a moment where I had floundered for somewhere to conceal myself.

The situation was beginning to feel hopeless. I was angry and frustrated, and I couldn’t make those emotions go away. I couldn’t make the vibrating go away, and there was no place for me to take refuge.

Running down the street just slow enough to seem human, I found a park. Nothing noteworthy, but it was the best I’d been able to find so far. Some children still played on the playground in the evening light, but there was a stretch of space not taken up by families that was scattered with picnic tables. I took a seat at one, burying my face in my arms and trying to block out the sounds of shouting children.

My mind struggled to focus on something else. Anything else. It was difficult, but the vibrating did calm, little by little. I would be able to face the guys knowing that I hadn’t phased on accident after years of being a wolf. My pride could remain intact.

I needed that after what Joselyn had said to me.

I needed a lot more than that after what Joselyn had said to me.

Lifting my head up, I watched the children running around. A pale boy who looked about two went tumbling into the mulch, landing on his stomach. The tears were instantaneous. Even I cringed in solidarity with the kid. As I continued to watch, a dark-skinned girl who looked older than the boy came over and helped him up, offering him reassuring comments as she led him over to his father.

He was smiling by the time they made it to where many of the adults sat on the fringes of the playground. His father crouched down in front of him, but the boy was wiping his own tears away by then. He had no time for his father as his eyes kept flickering back towards the girl as if she’d become the coolest person in the world.

He’d recovered easily from an incident that he’d been screaming over less than a minute before. I had forgotten that kids were capable of that. It was impressive. I’d taken longer to calm myself down, but then again, I hadn’t had someone around willing to pick me up and tell me it was all right. Maybe that was the difference.

But I knew deep down that it wasn’t. I had had such people after everything had happened with Sam and Emily. I’d had my parents and Seth, but none of them had been capable of making it better. That was something children got that we lost the ability to do later in life.

I was jealous. I would admit that much.

I was particularly angry because I knew how right Joselyn had been. That had been difficult to hide from myself when I had been struggling to get my wolf under control.

Years after Sam and Emily had broken my heart, I was still scared. Maybe not in the same way I had been right after it happened, but I kept taking steps thinking that step would be the one that would put me over the finish line. It never was. There were always more steps to take, and I had yet to find the finish line.

Allowing Embry in had felt like the final step, but now it was beginning to feel like I had never let him in at all. I was still guarding some hidden piece of myself away in fear, and the scariest part was that this part of me seemed to be hidden away from me too. It wasn’t just Embry who I had been shielding it from.

I didn’t want to confront it myself, let alone share it with anyone else.

Burying my face in my arms, I tried again to block out the world.

My relationship with Embry was going to collapse in on itself because I couldn’t get my shit together. It was what I had known before we began dating, but I’d managed to lie to myself in the time since.

All along I’d known that when things fell apart, it wouldn’t be Embry’s fault. It would be mine.

**August 29th, 2010**

I kept those thoughts close to my chest, becoming better and better at keeping them locked away as the next week and then two passed. They were still in the forefront of my mind, but I learned all over again how to mask my thoughts while phased.

If Embry suspected that something was up, then he was doing an excellent job of hiding it from me.

Joselyn and I hadn’t spoken since that day, and for the moment, I was keeping it that way. I couldn’t stand the thought of facing her and admitting that she had been right. I was having too hard of a time facing myself with the thoughts. If I was going to mend things with Joselyn, it would only be in the future.

As I walked across La Push, the lazy Sunday morning was as calming as any morning had managed to be for me lately. I tried to let that comfort me, especially when I remembered where I was heading, yet it wasn’t as effective as I would have hoped.

I dragged my feet as I approached the familiar worn door. The commotion inside was audible to me before I’d knocked, and even once my knuckles had rapped against the wooden surface, it didn’t stop.

Several seconds passed before the door was pulled open. Embry stood in front of me, but my eyes stayed on him for little more than a second before I noticed Jacob pacing the length of the living room behind him.

I pushed passed Embry, brow furrowed as I took in the sight. Jake ran his hands through his hair for what was the millionth time if the state of it was any indication.

He’d been uptight for months due to the Volturi and Bella and Edward’s impending move. God knew that Jacob Black was one of the most stressed out people in La Push in the last several months, but this development was new. And I had a feeling that it was something new, not a previous annoyance finally getting the better of him.

“Rebecca’s coming to visit,” Embry muttered from beside me. His voice was hushed as if speaking any louder would disturb Jake from his pacing. “She called Rachel, and then Rachel called Billy. Billy called Jake, and now here we are.”

I nodded although it still felt bizarre. For one thing, it was difficult to believe that Rebecca was coming back for a visit without being begged to. She hadn’t stepped foot in La Push since she’d married Solomon and moved to Hawaii. I had thought it would be years before she would do so again, if she did at all.

“To La Push?” I asked, feeling the need to have it clarified for me. “Not, like, Seattle or anything to see Rachel.”

I took a seat next to Quil on the couch, and Embry followed suit, settling in on my other side and resting his arm on the back of the couch behind me.

“Not Seattle,” Quil confirmed. His eyes remained on Jake. They were wide as if in wonder over how Jacob was taking this news.

“She is stopping there,” Embry said, stepping in. “She’s spending a week or two with Rachel. Something like that. Jake wasn’t coherent when he told us.”

“But then she’s coming here,” Quil said. He turned his eyes away from Jake to look at us, but he continued to look flabbergasted. “Rebecca Black in La Push again. Can you believe it?”

I shook my head. There were no words that I could say. Embry and Quil were as thrown off by the development as I was, and if Jake’s continued inability to acknowledge my presence in his living room was any indication, he was even more shocked than we were.

“I can’t believe this,” Jake said for the first time, managing to surprise me enough that I sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. “Of all the times for her to just up and announce that she’s coming. After years of Dad trying to convince her—even Rachel trying to convince her—and she decides to come when we have so much shit going on.”

Only then did it hit me that Rebecca was clueless about the wolves and the vampires and...everything. She’d lived in Hawaii for so long and been so far removed from everything happening in La Push. It wasn’t that different from Rachel, but Paul had managed to imprint on Rachel the minute she got back and solve that problem. With Rebecca…

Rebecca was married, I reminded myself, and that was as far as I would allow my mind to wander with those possibilities.

“It’s not like she knows,” Embry said, always the one willing to play devil’s advocate and defend whoever needed defending. As if Jacob would seriously become pissed off at Rebecca for something she had no idea she’d done.

“Maybe she would if she’d bothered to come home before,” Jake snapped.

I watched him, wondering how much of this was the stress over the Volturi and how much of it was pent up anger that his sister had been gone for years. No wonder I’d walked in on him dissolving into a complete mess. I felt bad that seeing this made me feel better about myself and my problems.

“Maybe,” Embry allowed. “But it’s just as likely not. Would anyone have told her?”

Jake didn’t have a response to that, but he did put a stop to his pacing. It was good timing too as I was starting to feel nauseous watching him go back and forth. He dropped down into a chair with such force that I thought it might break, but the loud creak died down, and all appeared safe.

“Dad’s so happy about it,” Jake said, anger leaving his voice. Now he sounded nothing more than dejected. “Not that he tried to be obvious about it when we were talking. He tried to talk about how he knew it was terrible timing, but he’s excited. I know he is. He was when Rachel came back, and now Rebecca too. Shit. Then there’s the Volturi…”

“We know,” I said in the closest thing to comfort I could manage. “We get it, Jake.”

Jacob looked at me, and there was a moment of silence as no one said anything.

“I need to go,” I announced abruptly, unsure of how much longer I could stay in the house. Rebecca’s impending arrival felt more stifling the longer I thought about it. I stood, causing all three of them to look at me in confusion over the odd behavior.

“You got here five seconds ago,” Quil observed.

“More like five minutes,” I muttered to be difficult. Floundering for another excuse, a good reason for why I wasn’t staying, I looked around at them, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Just as I was about to give up and flee, Embry saved me.

“I’ll walk you home,” he said, standing up himself.

I watched him for several seconds, feeling tempted to turn him down. My reason for leaving had been an opportunity to clear my head. I wouldn’t have that if I let Embry come with me. At the same time, Joselyn’s words echoed through my head like they had every day since she’d said them.

Each time I shut Embry out, those words became truer, and I despised that.

So I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, that sounds good.”

I didn’t look at him as I headed for the door, giving Quil and Jake short goodbyes before I left. Both of them looked less confused than they had when I’d announced my departure, and I hated to think that they got it, that they knew what it was that I was doing. I couldn’t look at Embry to see if he did too.

We walked in silence half of the way to my house, but while I’d been determined to keep it, I couldn’t stop myself from breaking that silence eventually.

“So, Rebecca’s coming back,” I said, letting the words trail off in the hopes that Embry would be able to say something for me to respond to. I wasn’t sure what I wanted those words to be.

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. There was another long moment of silence, one that caused my hands to twitch as I tried to figure out what to do or say. It felt scarily like the times before Embry and I had been a couple, when I’d been unsure around him. It was a time that I had thought was in the past.

A huge difference was that this time I knew what he was thinking. I knew why he wasn’t talking to me, and it scared me more than being clueless would have.

“Rebecca Black, as in the one woman left who would make the ideal imprint,” I choked out, getting the obvious out in the open.

There was a pause in Embry’s step as he took in what I had said, but he recovered quickly without looking me in the eye. I both hated myself for saying it out loud and felt proud of myself for it.

“Depends on who you think an ideal imprint would be,” Embry responded quietly.

There was a temptation to roll my eyes, but I stopped myself. Embry had once admitted that Rebecca’s genes made her a strong choice of imprint for anyone who subscribed to the theory that imprinting was based on creating the next generation of wolves.

“I know you don’t believe that,” I said. “The making new wolves shit. I know that, but you can’t lie to me and say that it didn’t cross your mind when you found out that Rebecca is coming. You can’t say that you didn’t, even if it was only for a second, think about the fact that she was a Black and that you’re currently the oldest unimprinted wolf except for me. You can’t.”

“I can’t,” Embry confirmed. “I did think about that, but it doesn’t change anything I told you before. Yes, there’s this fear that I could imprint on her.” His voice nearly broke, and I knew I was doing a terrible job of hiding how much hearing it made me want to cry. Pinpricks began stabbing at my eyes. “But none of that changes the things I told you about imprinting before, Leah. I still don’t think I’ll imprint on her. Becca is married, for one thing, and I have to believe that fate wouldn’t do that. I can’t make myself believe that I’m meant to imprint on Rebecca. Or that any of the wolves are meant to imprint on Rebecca.”

There was no response. Nothing left to say. We wouldn’t know what would happen until Rebecca got here, and I knew that Embry was telling me the truth.

The logical part of his mind didn’t believe he would imprint, but other parts of him did. I wasn’t sure what parts of me felt scared, but as the time began ticking towards when Rebecca would arrive, I became increasingly sure that it was all of me.

**August 30th, 2010**

It took less than twenty-four hours before I realized that I couldn’t do it anymore.

The path back to Embry, Quil, and Jake’s felt different in the dark. I’d never made that journey before in my current state of mind.

I hadn’t taken a jacket of any kind when I had left my house. I was a wolf, after all, and in any case, it was August. Maybe the tail end of August, but nothing had led me to think a jacket would be necessary. I hadn’t needed one of those in years.

That was why the chill that began to creep under my skin as I walked was shocking. I found myself wrapping my arms around my abdomen, trying to trap in as much body heat as I could. There was a quickness to my step that wasn’t attributable to an eagerness to reach my destination so much as it was from a desire to escape the cold that seemed to follow me the entire way there.

Of course they were all asleep when I arrived. It was the middle of the night. The key I’d been given months ago felt like a heavyweight in my pocket. I almost didn’t reach for it. For a moment, my hand was poised to knock before I reconsidered.

The last thing I wanted was to deal with all three of them. I wasn’t confident that I could even deal with Embry.

Taking the key from my pocket, I unlocked the door, pushing it back to make as little noise as possible. If any of them woke up, they would be able to detect that it was me, but I would prefer if I didn’t have to deal with that.

The floor had creaked since they’d moved in, and I tried my best to judge where the worst spots were as I made my way down the short hallway. Embry’s room was on one side of the bathroom that divided the hall, isolating him from Quil and Jake.

I had never been more thankful for that fact.

I couldn’t bring myself to knock on his bedroom door and, once again, potentially wake up the entire apartment. Instead, I pushed it aside, faced with the familiar view of an asleep Embry. My heart felt like it was being wrung out as I took him in. Few sights could as effectively strike me as this one.

Taking several steps forward, I was careful to tug the door closed behind me. Embry was a heavy sleeper, and he didn’t seem to have been woken up by any of my movements in the apartment so far, which was, admittedly, a trait that was necessary for all three of them to live in this apartment together.

I perched myself on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb him yet. I gave myself three more seconds of watching him before I leaned over to wake him up.

“Embry,” I murmured. It was so much like every other time I had woken him from sleep, but all of those times had felt happier than this. It made me feel guilty that I was doing this, but that sinking need was still making my stomach twist.

It took repeating his name several more times for Embry to begin to stir. I gave him all the time he needed, leaning back as he began to take in his surroundings and realize that I was there. He seemed to have surmised as much before his eyes were open, as they snapped onto me as soon as his eyelids fluttered open.

“Leah?”

Embry rolled over so that he was on his back, rubbing at his eyes as if doing so might help him see that I was little more than a mirage. I watched this, familiar with the process Embry went through upon waking up and the different steps he took to come to his full awareness. When he dropped his hand from his eyes and looked at me again, I could tell that he had assured himself that I was real and that he wasn’t still lost in some dream.

“Yeah, sorry,” I apologized, not able to forgive myself for waking him up. Especially considering the reason.

“It’s fine,” he assured me, struggling to push himself onto his elbows while he was still half asleep. “Just...what are you doing here in the middle of the night? Not that it’s bad or anything. I don’t understand…”

For once, Embry was struggling to put his thoughts into words. My presence had thrown him off enough that he couldn’t even question me upon waking up. That knowledge charmed me, and I felt butterflies in my stomach. The first butterflies that weren’t an ominous sign of what I needed to tell him. For a split second, I almost decided not to do it and to instead lie down with Embry and tell him to go back to sleep.

But that’s not what I did. I couldn’t do that. The problem wouldn’t go away come morning. I had learned as much in the last twenty-four hours. I had to do this, and I had to do it before I lost my nerve and cuddled into Embry’s side.

“We need to talk.”

Embry’s brow furrowed, but I saw a glimmer of recognition there like he had already put together what it was that I needed to discuss. No doubt he had. It felt like this giant issue hanging between us that neither one of us wanted to reach into and discuss even though we had to.

“In the middle of the night?” Embry asked, a hint of desperation in his voice. He didn’t want to do this anymore than I did. Possibly, he wanted it less than I did. He hadn’t been the one of traipse across La Push in the middle of the night. “Not in the morning when we’re both awake?”

“No,” I said. “I need to talk now. If we wait until morning, I’ll lose my nerve.”

Embry looked at me for a long moment, and I wondered if he was going to argue. He didn’t in the end, instead choosing to push himself up to a sitting position and put us on an equal level. His appearance was as disheveled as one would expect it to be when I’d just woken him up from sleep, and it gave him a vulnerable look that he wouldn’t have possessed otherwise.

Seeing that made it difficult to say what I needed to say. I had thought that doing this in the night would be easier because I could hide away in the dark if need be, but it turned out that the dark also revealed aspects of others that you didn’t see in the daytime. Ones that I would have preferred not to see in that moment.

“What do you have to say?” Embry asked, a note of finality in his voice.

“You know what I have to say,” I tried as one last ditch effort to achieve the same effect without having to say the words.

“Leah,” Embry began, voice dangerously low. If I held out any longer, I could see that he would lose his patience with me, and I almost welcomed it. His anger would be easier to deal with than his disappointment. “Tell me before the wait becomes too much.”

Seeing that Embry was as undone as I was gave me a boost of confidence. It didn’t make saying what I had to say more appealing than before, but it did reassure me that I could do it whether it was pleasant or not.

Taking a deep breath, I tried to brace myself for the fallout.

“I can’t do this.”

There was a moment of silence during which I couldn’t take my eyes off of Embry’s. I hadn’t thought I would be able to look at him after saying it, but as it turned out, his eyes had locked mine into place with their intensity. Not just my eyes either but all of me. All of me had become frozen by Embry with little more than a look.

Eventually, he asked, “Are you saying that you can’t say it or is that all that you had to say?”

He knew the answer to that. We both knew that he did. Still, I knew that the question came out of a final wish that he might be wrong, so I humored him by saying, “That’s what I have to say. I can’t do this anymore.”

This time I motioned between us as I said it, leaving little room for interpretation as to what I meant by it. Embry didn’t have a noticeable reaction. The sadness in his eyes had already been there, but I did detect a slight shiver that ran down the length of his body as he digested my words.

“You can’t do me anymore, in other words.”

I cringed at the way it sounded. “That’s not what I’m saying, Embry-”

“It is. You didn’t say those exact words, but it’s what it means, isn’t it?”

“Embry,” I said, yearning for him to understand where I was coming from, but I had to cut myself off. There were no words coming to mind that could share how I felt. Besides, I was certain that Embry got what I was thinking. He just didn’t agree with how I was acting on it, and that wouldn’t change no matter how I tried to explain myself. I knew Embry well enough to know that.

Embry laughed, a noise that shocked me. It was strangled and more pathetic sounding than any laugh I had previously heard come out of his mouth. Suddenly, I was reminded that I had wanted to convince him to go outside with me. That had been my genius plan to avoid waking up Jake and Quil and to keep this conversation private. Of course it hadn’t worked out that way. I was foolish to think there was a chance of this moment going the way I had planned it.

“I can’t believe it,” Embry said, laying back down on the bed. He stared up at the ceiling, avoiding looking at me in a way that I knew had to be intentional. “I really can’t. I...”

He cut himself off with a sigh, rubbing his hand across his face. A large part of me wanted to lay down next to him and join him in staring up at the ceiling, but it didn’t feel right. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was intruding by being in his bedroom.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, voice breaking. “I’m really sorry.”

My tears were close to the surface, and I was positive they were going to break through if I didn’t get away, yet I also couldn’t bring myself to leave. Leaving meant what had happened between us was final. That everything was in the past. And despite being the one to instigate the breakup, I didn’t want that.

I wanted Embry.

But I couldn’t have him.

Embry looked over at me. The anger that had taken over his face moments earlier had faded into sadness. He looked at me with such concern and care that I was once again tempted to take everything back, but I couldn’t let myself do so.

He reached out to take my hand, and I let him, grasping his as if neither one of us would let go.

“I know you are,” he whispered. Everything said between us felt more like a secret than it had before. “I know. That’s why I’m upset that you’re doing it.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, swiping at my eyes to try to catch any stray tears. I hated that Embry could be vague even at a time like this. Like he was purposefully making me have to guess at what he was saying in order to keep me there longer.

Maybe he was.

“It means that I’m in love with you, and I know that you’re in love with me too.”

Every cell in my body burned. We’d never used that word. Neither one of us. I’d thought it once or twice, but each time, I had been quick to shove it to the backburner, convinced that I could sort out my emotions another day. I’d never wanted to deal with it.

I’d wanted to hear it from Embry even less, but I would have been lying if I said there wasn’t a feeling of warmth in the pit of my stomach upon hearing it. That didn’t mean I was happy about it. I felt pissed, more at the universe and the situation than at Embry. Everything was fucked up. My life was fucked up.

“Leah,” Embry continued, sitting up in the bed again in order to make eye contact with me, but I rebuffed him, keeping my eyes on the quilt underneath us. “Please don’t do this. I know I can’t stop you, but I love you. I want to be with you. Forever. Imprint or no imprint. Okay? Fuck imprinting. It’s complete and utter shit. I don’t care about it. I want you, and I know you know that. I know you do. Even if you’re scared. Please don’t let this ruin us.”

The pattern on the quilt looked like it was swirling around before my eyes, even in the darkness. I focused on taking deep breaths, but each of them felt shallower than the one before.

“I-I have to go,” I choked out.

Pushing off of the bed, I hurried from the room. Embry made no attempts to follow me. No longer caring if Jacob or Quil woke up, I stumbled down the hall and out the front door.

Even the outside felt oppressive as I hurried through the woods. The trees themselves pushed in on me like a cage.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t close to phasing this time. On the contrary, there was little that I wanted to do other than crawl into a ball and cry on the forest floor. It was taking all of my energy to continue putting one foot in front of the other in the direction of home. I wasn’t sure that I could have managed to phase if I had tried.

Two days later, when I tried for the first time, I realized that I was right.

I couldn’t phase.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd be very interested in hearing what everyone thinks about this chapter. Hopefully no one hates me too much. Just remember that the story isn't over yet.


	9. September

**September 3rd, 2010**

My life had consisted of the same routine for a long time, and it was a routine that I had welcomed. Work, pack duties, and Embry. That had taken up the bulk of my time.

Now I had one of those things. Well, technically I had two, but I hadn’t been able to phase in the days since I had broken up with Embry. A fact that I hadn’t been able to keep from Jacob for long despite my ardent wishes too. I couldn’t come up with another believable excuse for why his beta lacked the capabilities of doing what was asked of her.

So I missed the subsequent training sessions, and as I learned through the grapevine, Embry did too.

Whatever had managed to do this, it had caught the entire pack by surprise. By now, everyone knew that neither of us were able to phase, and they were just as aware that something had happened between us that led to a breakup. No one asked me any questions, and I was sure they didn’t ask Embry any either. They left us alone even as I was sure they were gossiping about it behind our backs.

I hated it when I bothered to think about it, but I didn’t bother with it that much. I had bigger worries, and I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to know what the fuck was going on because I did too.

When I’d first phased, I’d despised it, but somewhere along the way it had become a crucial part of my identity. An identity that now felt unsalvageable as I struggled—and failed—to phase each day. It was a frustrating ritual but one that I couldn’t stop myself from doing five times a day. Not until it worked.

“Leah.” Seth rapped his knuckles against my doorframe.

“Yeah,” I said, signalling that he could push open the door that wasn’t latched shut. “What is it?”

“You remember what today is, right?” Seth asked, hesitating in the doorway.

“Of course, I do. The ever elusive Rebecca Black is making her way back to our humble neck of the woods.”

“Right,” Seth said slowly, trying to assess my current state.

I’d taken this breakup differently than I had taken the breakup with Sam. Then, I’d been prone to tears for months, and my sadness and anger had manifested themselves in any number of ways designed to make sure those around me knew how miserable I was.

This time around, my suffering was subdued. I didn’t react in ways that brought attention to myself. Mostly, I was just quiet. Quieter than was normal, and I was finding that freaked people out as effectively as the dramatic coping mechanisms had.

My brother couldn’t figure out what the hell he was supposed to do.

“So,” Seth continued, lingering in the doorway, “do you want to come with me to the Blacks’, or are you staying here?”

I sighed. I’d been asking myself that same question for more than a day. Did I want to see Rebecca? She’d done nothing wrong, and I couldn’t blame her mere existence for the breakup with Embry. It would have happened whether she were around or not.

Still, her name had become connected with the event in my mind, and I knew it would be difficult to shake that connection when she was standing in front of me. I’d only broken up with Embry a week ago. I wasn’t ready to face a possible imprint yet, even if Rebecca would be clueless as to why I was acting odd.

That had almost been enough to convince me not to go, but…

“I should do something to earn my place as beta considering I haven’t been otherwise,” I told Seth, getting up from my spot on the bed to make myself look less like a mess before leaving.

“You don’t need to earn anything,” Seth insisted. His nervousness had left for the first time in his insistence that I push away the negative thoughts. “Not being able to phase isn’t your fault, and Jake gets that. He’d also get you not coming, I’m sure.”

I shrugged, running my brush through my hair.

“He would, but I want to go. Whether or not Jacob finds me useful as beta isn’t the point. I want to feel useful to myself. I don’t when I’m laying around here all the time.”

“You’re not laying around,” Seth pointed out. “You go to work every day. You do stuff.”

I snorted. “Yeah, sure, but that doesn’t feel the same. Besides, I do nothing except go to work and then lay around. I want to do something else to feel useful.”

Looking back, I barely managed to catch Seth’s shrug as he accepted my answer. “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll be downstairs when you’re ready to go. Rebecca and Rachel left Seattle a while ago. It shouldn’t be that long before they’re here, if you want to make sure that we’re there before they are.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted that or not. Really, it didn’t matter either way. Both had the same outcome, and when it came down to it, I didn’t want to be there at all.

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” is what I told Seth, but I took my time. While I typically wouldn’t have bothered reapplying makeup and even putting on more than I had worn earlier in the day, I did this time, figuring that I might as well use up the time.

It still hadn’t been that long when I appeared in the living room. Seth didn’t complain about having to wait like he might have in the past. In fact, he was strangely quiet, something that I knew was a direct result of my recent behavior.

I hated that. I hated knowing that I was making people tread on eggshells around me. For the first time in days, I wanted to have a conversation. Even if it came out of not wanting Seth to begin to feel distant. I had already lost Embry, and suddenly, I was worrying about losing my brother because I was incompetent when it came to relationships.

“How are you and Al?” I asked, needing to say something that would make it feel normal between us. It was the first thing that came to mind, and I also realized as I said it that I hadn’t asked in a long time.

Seth was surprised to hear the question coming from me. I hadn’t been gunning to hear anyone else’s happy relationship stories, and Seth’s relationship stories were ridiculously happy. I knew that much. It had made me happy as well once they’d gotten together. I wanted my little brother to be happy almost more than I wanted to be happy myself. I had to remind myself of that as I watched a smile appear on his face in spite of himself.

“We’re good,” he admitted, but I could tell from his growing smile that they were more than ‘good’.

“I’m glad,” I assured him, and I was happy to hear that my voice sounded as genuine as I meant to be. “You both deserve it.”

Seth nodded. “But you do too,” he said, reaching out to nudge my arm. “You know that, right?”

I shrugged, not knowing what else to do. I wouldn’t say that I knew that. I wasn’t sure if I deserved anything at all, and it wasn’t because I felt I was a terrible person who deserved nothing. I just didn’t think there was any particular reason I was meant to have something wonderful. I felt...neutral about it. Maybe I would find something good, maybe I wouldn’t. I didn’t deserve anything either way.

“Leah, I’m serious.”

I glanced over at Seth with a frown. “I know you are. Look, Seth, I promise that I will never doubt that you care about me and want the best for me. Can we not talk about this now? I need time before we talk about it. Even in future terms.”

Seth looked like he would object for a moment before he gave a short nod. “Yeah, yeah, we can wait, but please let me know when you’re ready. I do want to talk to you about it, Leah.”

I offered him as bright of a smile as I could, even if it wasn’t convincing. “Thank you,” I whispered to him. “That means a lot.”

And it did. It meant more than anything else that anyone had managed to say to me since it happened. Seth had always been this bright light in my life, whether he was trying to be or not. Seeing him happy made me feel better. I wasn’t sure if Seth had been able to see that for himself in the past. As far as I could tell, he was oblivious to how important he was to me.

The Black house came into view. It had been a while since I had been there. With Rachel living in Seattle and Jake living with Embry and Quil, there hadn’t been any reason for me to show up here.

That hadn’t been something I’d bothered to think about before because it hadn’t meant anything, but it made walking into the house to see Rebecca feel that much stranger.

Seth entered before me, greeting everyone happily as he did so. He and Quil had started up an excited conversation almost as soon as Seth was in the door. I turned away from them to look at the only other occupants of the room: Jacob, Billy, Paul...and Embry.

I’d known that he would be here. He and Rebecca had never been friends considering she had left before any of us could consider her younger brother and his friends as more than annoying little kids. But he and Quil had been over at the house on a daily basis, something that had granted them little brother-like status with both Rebecca and Rachel.

I’d known that he would be here to greet her, and it was one of the biggest reasons why I’d been reluctant to come.

For a moment, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t offered any sort of greeting. Then, Paul snorted and said, “Hi, Clearwater. You coming all the way in?”

Realizing I was still standing in front of the door, I jumped forward. Then I realized that I didn’t know where to go, the whole reason I had lingered by the door in the first place, and I froze, looking around the room.

Billy’s wheelchair was parked in its usual spot in the living room. Quil had sprawled himself on the floor, and Seth had settled down there as well during their conversation. Paul took the one chair in the room, while Jacob and Embry sat on the couch. The cushion between them was the only free seat in the room unless I wanted to join Seth and Quil on the floor.

Embry kept his eyes on the floor as I hesitated. Seth and Quil continued to talk as if oblivious. But Jake, Paul, and Billy watched to see what I was about to do.

Taking a deep breath, I made my way around the couch and perched myself between Jacob and Embry, not wanting to get comfortable in the seat in case I accidentally scooted closer to Embry.

I didn’t need to worry. Embry had pushed himself into the armrest in a way that he had hoped would be discreet, but I was too aware of him not to notice. In fact, the motion seemed to scream at me as I struggled to calm my racing heart and appear like I was fine.

“What’s the last you heard from Rebecca and Rachel?” Seth asked, startling me out of my fearful thoughts.

Everyone looked up at Seth, but Jacob was the only one who bothered with an answer.

“They called and said they were around half an hour away, and that was—what?—fifteen minutes ago?”

He looked around the room for agreement or disagreement, but all he got out of it were silent nods from Quil and Billy.

I would have happily been anywhere else in the world in that moment than right there in the Blacks’ living room. I would have settled for eating dinner with my precious stepsister or even sitting through dinner on the Cullens’ home turf. Anything that didn’t involve Embry being close enough to touch yet refusing to glance at me.

“So...about fifteen minutes,” Seth confirmed to provide a break from the oppressive silence that was pressing in on the room.

“About fifteen minutes,” Jake confirmed.

This led to a period of silence where everyone twiddled their thumbs and tried not to think about how much this sucked. Or maybe that was me and I was projecting my own emotions onto the room. It was difficult to tell when every part of my brain was focused on escape.

It felt like hours later when their car pulled up outside despite the fact that scattered conversation had started up around the room. I remained highly attuned to Embry’s continued silence.

Everyone else made their way to the door, but I remained in the same spot, feeling like I might hyperventilate. It wasn’t a feeling I was familiar with, and that only caused the feeling of dread to strengthen in the pit of my stomach.

Embry scooted forward in his seat, but he didn’t stand up like Jake had on my opposite side. Instead, Embry looked at me for the first time since I’d walked in the door. Unable to help myself, we made eye contact, and the struggle to breathe was forgotten as I saw the fear behind Embry’s own eyes. He was terrified, I realized. I’d known that he had some trepidation over the possibility of imprinting on Rebecca, but in that moment I realized that he was panicked. Even if I didn’t know if this had come over him in the moment or if he’d been dealing with it for days.

“You okay?” he asked, and I felt my heart stutter knowing that he was concerned about me when he was so affected himself.

“Fine,” I whispered, unable to put my real feelings into words. This whole exchange was more of a charade than anything else anyway. We were doing the real communication with our eyes.

I didn’t need to ask Embry the same question he had asked me because I’d already gotten my answer, and it was far more truthful than anything that would come out of his mouth.

“We should-” Embry cut himself off, taking what seemed to be a difficult breath. “We should go say hi to them.”

I nodded, forcing myself to stand up on wobbling legs. Not looking back at Embry, I followed everyone else out the door that they had left swinging open. Embry’s steps sounded behind me, making my shoulders stiffen as I walked.

As I paused at the top of the porch steps, I took in Rebecca embracing her father and then Jacob. Rachel had attached herself to Paul’s side as soon as she was out of the car.

There was no Solomon in sight. Rebecca had decided to come back for this visit alone, although I hadn’t heard of any particular reason why Solomon wasn’t with her. All I knew was that his absence did nothing to quell my worries.

Descending the steps, I worked on controlling my features. Rebecca was my friend. We didn’t talk much these days, but we remained close enough to check up with each other occasionally. That was better than most of my former friendships had fared. Combine that with the fact that she would have no way of knowing why I would act off with her, and I knew that a lot was riding on my ability to act normal around her.

“Leah,” Rebecca called the second she saw me. She’d only just pulled away from Jacob, making me the first outside of her family that she’d bothered to show any attention to.

“Rebecca, hi.”

There was a smile on my face, but it felt tight and unnatural. Rebecca didn’t seem to notice, too caught up in her excitement. I was sure that everyone else did, but they knew what had me like this. I knew they did. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out, even if Embry had been the one to plant the idea of it in my head in the first place.

Rebecca, in her obliviousness, squeezed me tightly, rocking back and forth. “It’s so good to see you,” she murmured into my shoulder. She’d always been more physically affectionate than Rachel or me. We’d tolerated it for many years, but I’d become unused to it since she’d left. There were few people in La Push who would have dared hug me like this after everything that had happened.

“I’ve missed you too,” I whispered loudly enough for her to hear. The sentiment was genuine. As one of my childhood best friends, I’d missed Rebecca immensely. Right after she’d left, I’d felt such a hole, and it hadn’t helped that it had been close to Rachel’s own departure. That’s what made my fear of her even more difficult to take. I wanted to enjoy this moment, not feel the terror residing in the pit of my stomach.

The hug couldn’t last forever, and as soon as Rebecca let go of me, her eyes snapped onto the person standing behind me. My heart stopped beating, and my lungs stopped taking in air.

“Embry, hi.” Rebecca brushed past me to hug Embry. Her smile had been bright and infectious, but there had been nothing abnormal in it. Nothing I wouldn’t have expected after she had seen him for the first time in years.

“You’ve grown. Wow,” she was telling him as I forced myself to turn around. I refused to make eye contact with anyone else, not wanting to see the expressions on their faces.

“Uh, yeah,” Embry said, struggling with speech. It made my heart speed up in a moment of panic, but I managed to get myself under control, realizing that Embry was struggling out of a feeling of awkwardness and not because he had become enamored. “I am twenty, Becca.”

Rebecca let out a long exhale as if she couldn’t process that fact. “I guess you are,” she admitted. “I know that obviously. Jacob is too. I was never able to connect each birthday with how you must be growing.” She turned towards Quil, giving him the same inspection she’d been giving Embry moments before. “But you are growing up, aren’t you?”

“I think we’ve already grown up,” Quil said with a smirk that revealed how at ease he was. I wished I could have achieved the same thing. “We’re adults, Becca.”

Rebecca snorted. “Right. Okay. In a legal sense, I’ll accept that, but I think you’re going to have to prove your adulthood to me while I’m here. Otherwise, I won’t believe it.”

I wondered if Rebecca had stopped to think about how Embry, Jake, and Quil were all older than she had been when she’d ran off to Hawaii to get married. I wasn’t sure if it would have entered her awareness, but it didn’t escape my own. She hadn’t been the epitome of maturity at that age either.

Rebecca moved on, walking towards Rachel and Paul. She began to introduce herself, not having known Paul well before. If Embry and Quil had been annoying little kids to us, Paul had been just another little kid. One who we knew of but never bothered to pay attention to. Now Rebecca had to get to know him as her future brother-in-law.

When everyone’s attention was turned away from me—everyone’s except Embry’s—I turned away from them. Embry’s eyes were on me, not so much as glancing towards Rebecca. 

That was the first thing I noticed, but I didn’t dare put much stock in it. I knew that Embry had the willpower to force himself to behave against his instincts, and he would never want to be wrong. Imprint or no imprint, I could imagine Embry fighting it, and that thought scared me more than him accepting it ever could.

There was a question in my eyes, one that I couldn’t voice out loud, and I knew Embry would give me a straight answer. He would never deny me that, but when he did answer, he didn’t do so verbally. He shook his head, and I felt a gust of air rush out of my lungs. Tons of pressure that had been pressing in on me lifted. A ringing in my ears dissipated.

“Really?” I whispered low enough that, if anyone could hear, it would only have been the other wolves.

“Really,” he confirmed, a grin forming on his face. “No imprint. Nothing.”

The feeling that came over me then must have been relief, but it was harder to take than the fear had been. I felt like my legs might collapse out from under me, and maintaining my balance while continuing to breathe became my sole focus.

Embry reached out to place a hand on my back, trying to steady me but also not wanting to alert Rebecca to the danger. There was no way to explain this away to her, I reminded myself. I had to pull myself together or I was going to cause trouble. Trouble that I had no desire to deal with.

It was tempting, with Embry close and touching me for the first time in days, to give in and lean into Embry’s side. Every cell in my body tingled at the possibility, but I refrained from doing so. I still hadn’t processed everything that had happened.

“No imprint,” I muttered under my breath. Though I knew that Embry had to have heard it, he gave no indication of it. Just kept his hand on my back as if he were still worried I would topple over otherwise. I couldn’t find it in me to tell him that I felt confident that I could stand on my own.

The others had begun ambling towards the house. We should have been following them, but instead, I remained standing there, unsure of what to do. I didn’t want Embry’s hand to leave my back, and I couldn’t leave when I had just seen Rebecca for the first time in years.

Rachel took a few steps towards the door before she noticed us, and she hung back as the others went inside. Her brow wrinkled as she examined us, from the hand on my back to the revealing look on my face.

She glanced back at the door, but she didn’t make a move to follow, sighing as she made her decision.

Rachel hadn’t been in La Push in the days since I’d broken up with Embry, but that didn’t mean she was clueless. She knew everything as well as anyone could be expected to. Few people had been privy to my personal thoughts about it the way Rachel had.

“Hey, Embry,” Rachel began, and I felt a sense of dread in my stomach. “You want to go inside and tell the others that Leah and I will be there in a second? We have a quick errand to run.”

I glanced up at Embry, taking in his perplexed expression. He looked down at me, and once again, I was overwhelmed with making eye contact after what had happened between us. I could have stared at him forever, but there was a question that I needed to answer. Offering him a slight nod, I felt his hand leave my back. There was an instinctual need to gain contact again, and I had to clench my fists to keep myself from reaching out and revealing myself.

Embry left, looking back at me one more time before he disappeared inside the house.

I was left with no choice but to face Rachel. When she’d stuck behind, I’d had little doubt that she would remove me from Embry to talk, especially when this was the first time she’d seen us together since the breakup. There was just one thing I didn’t understand.

“What errands?” I asked.

Instead of answering, Rachel turned back to her car and opened the driver’s side door, motioning for me to go around and get inside as well.

“We’re going to Emily’s,” she said as soon as I had my door open.

“Emily’s,” I repeated in surprise. “But you don’t talk to Emily anymore unless you have to.”

Rachel shrugged. “We’re both imprints. That makes me almost as tied to her as I am to Paul. Not talking doesn’t change that.”

“Okay,” I said, drawing out the word like a question. “But why does that mean we’re going to talk to her now?”

“You think Kim is over there?” Rachel asked, ignoring my question. “I know she works Fridays usually, but it’s late enough that she might be off, right?”

I shrugged, not up to date on Kim’s work schedule or when she went to visit Emily. It was clear that Rachel wasn’t going to explain herself to me, so I shut up, looking out the window until Sam and Emily’s house came into view.

Sure enough, Jared’s car was in the driveway when we arrived, and it didn’t take long to assess that both he and Kim were there.

If I was surprised by the ‘errand’ Rachel had taken me on, Emily might as well have been looking at a ghost when she opened the door and saw Rachel in front of her. Her eyes flickered away for a second to see me, but they were back on Rachel soon enough, marveling over her former friend’s presence on her doorstep.

“Mind if we come in?” Rachel asked without any warmth.

If Emily sensed something strange, she didn’t let on. There was a smile on her face after she’d gotten over her initial shock, and she stepped aside as she said, “No, of course not. Come in.”

I followed Rachel inside and saw that Kim and the baby were the only ones in the living room. It was easy enough to hear Jared and Sam in another room of the house along with Simone, but I had a feeling they had quieted down in an effort to hear us. No one could believe Rachel had come here, let alone with me in tow.

“How are you?” Emily asked as she retook her seat. Rachel didn’t look her in the eyes from where she had sat down next to Kim, but she did answer.

“I’m good,” she said, and I got the impression that she was trying to pack as much sincerity into her answer as she could, still wanting to prove Emily wrong. “Really good. Work’s amazing, and I’ve enjoyed being back in Seattle.”

“That’s nice,” Emily said with a fake smile.

Just listening to this conversation was painful.

“Sorry for interrupting,” I began, not feeling sorry at all, “but can I have an explanation?” I asked, turning towards Rachel. “No offense to you guys, but Rachel, you did pull me away from Rebecca’s homecoming and bring me here with no explanation. And I think Emily and Kim are as confused as I am.”

Kim tried her hardest to appear like she disagreed, like she wasn’t shocked by Rachel’s sudden appearance, but it was a useless effort. Not least of all because Emily and Rachel were paying her little attention at the moment.

“I came to talk about you and Embry,” Rachel stated matter-of-factly. Like that should make sense to me.

“That doesn’t explain anything. Why did we need to come here to discuss me and Embry?”

“Because you were terrified he’d imprint on Rebecca. Because you broke up with him based on your fear that he would imprint. Because you still have these massive issues with imprinting, and they need to be dealt with.”

The more I questioned her, the more she started to sound like she was talking to a five-year-old or maybe the infant sitting in her playpen on the other side of the room.

“What the fuck, Rachel?” was the only comeback I could come up with.

Emily shifted in her seat before asking, “So, um, I know this is a touchy subject, but Rebecca’s here, right? Can we clarify what happened?”

Rachel smirked, looking happy that Emily had been brave enough to ask. “She’s here. She’s back at home with the family. Leah was terrified when Rebecca and I arrived because she thought Embry would imprint. I’d be willing to bet it’s why she dumped him in the first place. Except he didn’t imprint. Because, like anyone else could tell you, that was never going to happen.”

I cowered in my seat, feeling like an idiot who had said the wrong thing in front of a genius. Rachel wasn’t going to go easy on me, and now was not a time where I felt like I could take even the simplest of abuses.

“I get it,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t have thought there was a chance Embry would imprint on Rebecca. She’s married and whatever. It was a stupid fear. Can you let it go?”

There was a softening in Rachel’s features when she realized how strong of an effect she was having on me. “It wasn’t that stupid,” she relented. I was pretty sure that contradicted something she had said minutes before, but I wasn’t going to argue with her on the topic. “Just too scared, Leah. Still. I want to snap you out of it, not freak you out more.”

“You’re doing a great job,” I muttered under my breath.

With a sigh, Rachel turned back to Emily and Kim. “That’s why I came here,” she explained. “Leah, you keep freaking out about imprinting because you’ve built it up as some terrible thing that ruins your life, so why not talk to people who think about it differently? Maybe it’ll help, and dear God, you need help. I knew you’d broken up with Embry, and I knew it was bothering both of you. I didn’t expect to see that shit as soon as I got out of my car.”

For a moment, I stared at her. There was no way Rachel Black was telling me these things.

“You want me to be more optimistic?”

“I want you to stop acting like the world is going to eat you alive each time you take the smallest of risks.”

“I take risks,” I countered, knowing full well that I was missing the real argument. “I’ve been training multiple times a week to fight the strongest vampires in the world. I think I take more than enough risks.” I hoped that none of them would point out how long it had been since I’d last phased.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Risks with your heart. You’ve never seemed to have much fear about getting hurt physically.”

I wasn’t sure how true that was. As far as I was able to tell, physical injuries worried me as much as the average person, but that wasn’t worth arguing over.

Just as I was about to respond, Rachel continued speaking. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I wanted you to hear about imprinting from me, Emily, and Kim. Because you’ve never asked any of us about it, have you?”

My mouth snapped shut. I hadn’t. There had never been a bone in my body that desired having such a conversation, even with Rachel. It felt awkward, especially when three imprints were watching me at once. I wasn’t one of them, despite their attempts to include me since I was the only female wolf, and the fact that I didn’t fit in was never more apparent than when all three of them were watching me as they were then.

I was an outsider among them. Someone who would fit in better with Jared and Sam in the other room instead of with the imprints. I had no desire to sit there and listen to them go on about how lucky and in love they were.

“I haven’t,” I admitted, “but I don’t understand what there is to talk about.”

“There’s plenty,” Rachel said. She moved around in her seat as if she were settling in for a long conversation. I felt my own stomach sink at the realization that I wasn’t going to escape this anytime soon.

“Besides,” Rachel continued, “I think this will be good for all of us. Not just you, Leah. I know I’ve never talked about this with anyone either.”

“Okay,” Emily said, voice wavering, “but I’m with Leah. I don’t understand what you want us to talk about. What is there to say?”

Rachel rolled her eyes again. “Fine. We’ll start with questions then? And I’ll be as cheesy as possible. Maybe that will get my point across. Emily, what does imprinting mean to you?”

The way Emily’s face flushed would have been comical in other circumstances. I wasn’t sure what the cause was. While the question made me roll my eyes, I couldn’t account for the nervous ticks Emily began to show as soon as she heard the question. You would have thought that Rachel had asked about sex, but I had a strong feeling that Emily’s answer wasn’t going to go there.

“I-It means you’ve found who you’re meant to be with.” She looked proud of herself when she managed to get that much out, and she sat back as if admiring her accomplishment. 

Rachel wasn’t satisfied. “But what does it mean when you find who you’re meant to be with?”

Emily and Kim both gave her confused looks, but I knew where she was going with this. I knew that she’d been thinking about this, and I also knew this conversation was going towards territory I had covered with Embry. I hadn’t been ecstatic about having this conversation with him, and I didn’t want to have it with the imprints either.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Emily said. “Who you’re meant to be with. Who you’re meant to marry.”

“But do you have to marry the person you’re meant to be with?”

I wasn’t sure how much of this came from a genuine desire for an answer and how much of it was from an enjoyment of seeing Emily squirm. I felt uncomfortable as I watched.

Emily stuttered over several started sentences before she sighed in defeat. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess not, but that’s usually how it goes, isn’t it? Either way, it doesn’t matter. Imprinting just means that you’re meant to be with that person. Married, not married. Either way it’s the same outcome.”

Rachel didn’t attack that, just nodded along with Emily’s words. “But you think it’s about babies too, right?” she asked, causing Emily to freeze just as she thought that she had gotten off the hook. “That’s why you got angry with me. You think I should move back to La Push, marry Paul, and start popping out babies.”

Emily’s face had become a bright red, and the level of shame she exuded felt like something she should have shown a long time ago. Her eyes flickered around the room, never staying anywhere long.

“It’s not that I think you should do that. It’s only that I expected you to, and when you didn’t, it threw me off guard. But I swear that I am sorry for that, Rachel. I’ve already apologized.”

“I know,” Rachel said, the tone of her voice making it unclear whether or not she had accepted said apology. “That’s not what this is about.” There was a pause as she debated her own words. “Okay. Maybe that’s related to this, I’ll admit, but I’m not trying to get back at you like this is high school. I think this is good for all of us.”

“Why though?” Emily questioned. “What are we accomplishing here?”

“A better understanding of imprinting.”

I struggled to keep my eyes on the floor, feeling nervous. Emily and Kim still looked confused. They couldn’t understand what Rachel was getting at, and I had no hope that they would.

Rachel was starting to think that way too, and she wasn’t afraid to roll her eyes in overt annoyance. “Because no one knows what imprinting means, do they? And we never talk about it as if we don’t need to. Like we’ve got it figured out when we don’t have a clue. Then Leah goes and ruins her relationship over it.”

“Really, Rachel?” I shot at her, feeling my cheeks heat up.

“What? It’s true. I’m not going to let you deny it or make up other excuses.”

I let out a long noise of frustration. In my panic over today, I’d never bothered to consider this outcome. It hadn’t felt possible. How had I ended up in Emily’s house with Rachel demanding I open up to two people I steadfastly refused to open up to? If Rachel was doing this out of a need to convince me that fate didn’t have it out for me, she was doing a terrible job. I was more convinced of that than I had ever been before.

“I broke up with Embry because he might imprint,” I admitted, feeling like I’d been boxed into a corner with no way out. I was aware of Sam and Jared not that far away as I said it. They were staying quiet, not daring to interrupt us, and I knew they could hear every word that I said. None of this seemed to matter to the other girls, but I felt self-conscious not being able to know what they were thinking or even see their faces in order to guess.

“Does that make you happy?” I continued, voice rising in intensity. “I’m terrified about it. As anyone who dates an unimprinted wolf should be. There. I admitted it. Can I go now?”

“No.” Despite the simplicity of Rachel’s answer, it was said so forcefully that not even a wolf would have dared go against her. I stayed in my seat, glaring at someone that I would have trusted to never put me in this situation. “And that doesn’t make me happy,” she continued. “That’s why this is happening.”

“Rachel,” I began. I could hear the threat in my voice each time I spoke. “Nothing you can say or make me say is going to change the decisions I’ve already made. It’s my life. I’m an adult, and I can make decisions for myself. None of this is your responsibility.”

“It is though. You’re right that it comes down to you, Leah, but I’m your friend. One of your closest friends last I checked, and that means I’m supposed to help you whenever possible.”

“You call this helping?”

“Yes. Because you’re going to make yourself miserable if someone doesn’t shake some sense into you.”

I flopped against the back of the couch, groaning in frustration as I did. Emily and Kim were both watching Rachel and me with wide eyes. Even Emily seemed to have been cowed into silence, not sure what she should say unless she, too, wanted to be yelled at. She analyzed the situation as Rachel and I continued to steam, and eventually, she deemed it the right time to talk.

“I think I’m starting to get it,” she admitted, although I wasn’t sure what she was trying to tell us she had gotten. “You’re making us talk about imprinting to help Leah.”

Rachel shrugged. “I think it will help all of us in the long run. Leah’s just the one who needs it the most.”

Emily nodded like this made sense to her, and I pushed my head further back into the cushions it rested on, wishing I could fall asleep right then and there. No one could talk to me then. It felt like the only escape path I had.

“You really think Embry will imprint?”

It was the first time Kim had spoken since we’d arrived at the house, and my eyes flew open in surprise. Not lifting my head up, I tilted my head to the side to look at her. She had a wide-eyed look on her face, but she appeared earnest, like she had something to say that was important enough to chance speaking up.

“I don’t know,” I said harsher than I would have liked to speak to Kim most days. I couldn’t bring myself to monitor my tone. “That’s kind of the problem. Maybe he will; maybe he won’t. But unless someone can reveal something that I’ve managed to miss, it’s a possibility.”

Kim shook her head and leaned forward in her seat like she needed to get closer to me.

“Have you missed something?” she asked. It was the closest I had heard Kim come to using sarcasm. “Because Embry’s your soulmate as much as Jared is mine, Leah. I thought everyone could see that, including you.”

My hands began to shake, and I fiddled with the hem of my shirt to disguise it. I had to remind myself to breathe again as I watched Kim, seeing that she was dead serious.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I could hear the waver in my voice, but I hoped I was the only one. “Jared imprinted on you. Last I checked, Embry hasn’t imprinted on anyone. Least of all me. He’s not my soulmate.”

All three of them watched me with wide eyes, and I couldn’t figure out what it was about my words that had them looking like that. Not until Emily spoke.

“You can’t be serious,” she said. “You really think that, Leah?”

The question threw me off. If I’d been asked who the biggest proponent of imprinting was, I would have chosen Emily without much thought. She always appeared beyond thrilled to be an imprint. When I was in a darker place, I’d thought it had come out of a desperate need to compensate for the terrible shit that had come out of Sam imprinting on her, but more recently I’d begun to see it as one of Emily’s deeply held beliefs.

“Of course I do,” I continued, feeling exposed despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, I was only retelling information that was common knowledge among the pack. “Wolves imprint when they find their soulmate. If neither Embry or I have imprinted on each other, then we can’t be soulmates.”

I included myself to get them off my back. It had been a long time since I had entertained the idea that I might be capable of imprinting. It felt too far fetched and unlikely for me to hold out hope for it.

“No, no, no, no,” Emily repeated, shaking her head for emphasis. “You can’t think that. You can’t.”

She looked adamant, almost fearful, about the possibility.

“What do you mean?” I asked again. “Seriously, you guys. I don’t understand how I’m saying anything that would sound strange to you. It’s common sense.”

“It’s not though,” Kim said, sounding the most confident she had ever been while addressing me. “Because we all think Embry’s your soulmate.”

I looked around the room, surprised that no one wanted to contradict Kim’s words.

“If you’re joking, can you please stop it?”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “We’re not joking. What Kim said is the truth. We all think it. Or at least I do. I have for a long time.”

“Like...how long?”

Rachel shrugged and leaned back like she didn’t care much about the conversation, but I could detect a glimmer of amusement in her eyes and knew she was enjoying herself.

“You want to know something that I never told you?” I shrugged, knowing I would get the story either way. “When we were in high school, Jake had his friends over. Nothing unusual. And they made a mess in the living room before disappearing off somewhere. I didn’t want Dad to have to clean it up, so I was doing it myself. They must have been doing homework because there were papers and textbooks and stuff all over the floor and the coffee table.”

I had no idea where this could be going, but I felt my heart stuttering in anticipation.

“I couldn’t tell whose papers were whose, so I was stuffing them all together. I figured I’d make the boys sort them out for themselves later. It would serve them right, but then this one paper caught my eye.” She paused, narrowing her eyes at me. “I shouldn’t have found it. It fell out of a notebook when I picked the notebook up, but it was this thing Embry had written. At least, I figured it had to have been him because I knew he’d been infatuated with you for a while. Anyway, it was this list of reasons why he had no chance with you. Like ‘she’s with Sam’, ‘I’m too young’, and that sort of thing. And then the other half of the paper was reasons why he liked you. And, Leah, it wasn’t anything like I would have expected a middle school boy to write. He’d put things like ‘she used to play with me even though I annoyed her’ and ‘she’s nicer to Seth than Rachel and Rebecca are to Jake’. It struck me enough that I remember it now.

“And it’s not like I suddenly became convinced that Embry was your soulmate then. I mean, he was, like, twelve or something, and you were with Sam, and we all thought you were going to get married. But I remember being struck by how much he genuinely seemed to like you, and then, after everything happened, how much he still liked you. And when you two started dating, I felt happy that Embry was getting a chance. Not only that, but I was happy that you were getting to see what I saw when I found that paper.

“Trust me, Leah. It’s hard to have seen what’s developed between you two over the years and not want you to work things out. It doesn’t seem like anything but a huge shame for you to make yourselves miserable by pretending you aren’t head over heels in love with each other.”

It had been impossible to listen to Rachel’s story and not gape at her. Even once she’d finished, I continued to stare at her in shock. No words would come. It was even more shocking to see that Emily and Kim didn’t appear surprised by it the way I was, even though I was sure that Rachel had never shared that story with them before.

“See,” Kim said when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to speak, “you’re soulmates.”

I wasn’t sold. No matter how powerful of a story Rachel had managed to come up with.

“But he didn’t imprint on me,” I repeated. It was the one detail that kept running through my head. I couldn’t get passed it.

“He didn’t have to.” My eyes flew to Emily when she spoke, but she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were on the floor, but when she did glance up, I saw tears shining in them. As if she’d become overwhelmed with emotion and was struggling to hold it back.

“He didn’t have to imprint on you,” she repeated. “That’s the difference. Sam had to imprint on me. Otherwise, he would have married you. Jared had to imprint on Kim so that he would notice her. Paul had to imprint on Rachel, or she would have gone back to Seattle before they could get to know each other. And Jake and Quil… They imprinted on babies, Leah. There’s no way in hell they would have figured that out without an imprint.”

“Jake was about to kill Nessie,” Kim pointed out.

“And Ethan had that fling going on when he imprinted,” Rachel continued. “So he wouldn’t have asked his imprint out otherwise.”

I stared at them, unable to believe I was hearing this.

“Embry…” I took a deep breath, trying to compose myself. “Embry’s said all of this before.”

They looked at me with sadness. There was an intensity there that I had never expected to be on the receiving end of from them.

“But I didn’t believe him. It felt foolish to believe him.”

“I believe him,” Kim responded quietly.

“It’s like he’s always known that he was supposed to be with you,” Rachel said. Even she appeared close to tears. “If there was one wolf who wouldn’t need to imprint, it would be Embry. He figured it out for himself.”

“I-I need to go.”

I hurried up from my seat, gathering my things as I went. I needed to be out in the fresh air before I suffocated. I needed the freedom to think.

They watched me go, and I knew that I wasn’t going to make it back to the Blacks’. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go in there and act normal again.

**September 14th, 2010**

If Rachel thought that her effort would result in me running back to Embry, she was wrong. Weeks passed, and I made no move to correct the error of my ways.

She had succeeded in planting the idea in my mind that it had been an error, but there was still a fear that opening up to Embry would only result in pain. I couldn’t bring myself to do it when there was that much insecurity surrounding our relationship.

Embry started back at school, and I saw him even less than I had before.

Maybe it would have been easier to handle if I had had my best friend to talk to. My best friend who knew nothing about wolves or imprinting. My best friend who could have talked to me about something different.

But I didn’t. Joselyn wasn’t returning my calls, and it only led to me feeling worse than I would have otherwise. It certainly wasn’t instilling me with any hope that I could maintain positive relationships. That was for sure.

What Rachel had managed to do was make me desperate about getting ahold of Joselyn. I’d sent text messages and left voicemails, all of which went unanswered except for the occasional brief response.

This time, when the dialtone ended and a click signalled that someone had answered the phone, my heart stopped in my chest, and I began to panic. I hadn’t expected to speak to Joselyn today, and despite having made the call, I couldn’t remember what I had planned to say.

“Hello?” Joselyn asked from the other end of the line.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s nice to talk to you.”

I heard Joselyn sigh on the other end, and that was more of a positive reaction than I had expected. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Joselyn had answered the phone only to tell me to stop calling.

“Yeah, you too,” Joselyn said, but I couldn’t tell if the sentiment was genuine or not. “It’s strange not talking,” Joselyn continued, and I sighed. This time in the relief of knowing that Joselyn was serious.

“I’ve been calling,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if it was good to take such a risk. The last thing I wanted to do was make Joselyn angry at me again.

“I know. I just didn’t want to talk to you for a while.”

I nodded even though Joselyn wouldn’t be able to see the gesture.

“I understand. I fucked up. I know I fucked up. Everyone thinks so, and I get it, but I could use a conversation with someone who won’t remind me about that for five minutes.”

There was a pause as Joselyn considered my words.

“Is everyone in La Push angry with you too?”

Joselyn didn’t know the half of it. She couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her about the wolves or the pack or imprinting. None of it. She would never be able to know me on that level, and that always hurt when I was reminded of it. Still, she had seen enough of me and Embry to understand why everyone I knew was pissed off at me.

“Yeah, they are. Almost everyone. Enough that I’m not eager to talk to any of them.”

I could hear Joselyn moving around through the phone, like she was making herself comfortable as she settled in. Maybe she had been planning to keep this brief when she picked up, and I’d manage to activate her sympathy before she cut off the call.

“I know I don’t know any of them, but I’m sure it’s only because they care about you like I do.”

“Saying that doesn’t make me feel better.”

“I don’t think anything I can say will make you feel better. Only you can do that, and you know how.”

It was difficult not to throw a temper tantrum over the phone. No matter how immature that would have been, I was frustrated with everyone around me. I was also frustrated with myself, something that Joselyn had thrown out front and center. I didn’t want to be reminded of my own failings when it was already difficult to forget them. I’d laid awake many nights in a row thinking about them.

“Can I fix it though?” I asked. “I don’t mean can I apologize to Embry. I know I could, but would it fix anything? Or would it lead to more problems in the future?”

“There will always be problems. I’m sure there’d be plenty in your relationship. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be happier overall or that it wouldn’t be a good thing for the both of you. At any rate, I don’t think the problems would be as terrible as you seem to be imagining.”

I tried to believe her. I did. I even thought she might have convinced me a little.

That night I laid awake trying to make sense of it in my mind, and when I did fall asleep, it was to a dream of Embry and me together.

**September 29th, 2010**

As Nessie aged, I was needed less and less as a babysitter. She looked like a preteen these days, although I wasn’t sure what age they were considering her developmentally.

What I did know was that she watched herself now when there wasn’t anyone else around to do it. She even babysat Claire and Simone, although she had yet to be left alone with Chloe.

Years ago, I would have been nothing but thankful to be relieved of my former status as go-to babysitter, but after holding the position for so long, I felt disconnected from Nessie’s life these days. I was only aware of what was happening with her in the vaguest of ways, and when I did talk to her, it was typically at group gatherings, which she’d always been quieter at than when in smaller groups.

Since breaking up with Embry, I’d seen her even less because I never went over to Jake’s unless it was necessary. There was too much risk of seeing Embry as well. That meant that I hardly spoke to anyone in the pack these days. No one except Seth and Al, who was at our house more now that he and Seth couldn’t see each other at school each day.

So when Nessie called to ask if she could spend the evening at my house, I’d thought it was odd, but I’d agreed even though I never wanted to do much but take a nap after getting off work.

“Why aren’t you over at Jake’s?” I asked as soon as I’d let Nessie in the door.

Nessie shrugged, depositing the messenger bag she’d had slung over her shoulder down on the couch before sitting down beside it.

“I see him every other day. It’s not like I need to always be with him. Sometimes a change of pace is nice.”

I nodded along, accepting the answer. Maybe Nessie had started her rebellious years, or maybe she was just mature in a way parents of teenagers everywhere hoped their teenagers would be mature. There were countless reasons why Nessie might have chosen to come spend time at my house for no reason when she could have been with Jacob.

I chose not to question it further.

Despite how much she had grown in a short time, Nessie’s behavior was remarkably similar to how it had always been. She settled down on the couch, tugged a book out of her bag, and began to read. Nothing was different, and I wondered, yet again, why she had chosen to come over here.

Was our house quieter? If that was why, then she was lucky that Seth and Al happened to not be there. She wouldn’t be getting any peace and quiet if they showed up.

I knew she hadn’t come to see her grandfather because I had pointed out that Charlie was working late that night when she had first called.

Nessie flipped a page of her book, and I remembered that I should be doing something other than trying to rationalize the actions of a preteen. Instead, I grabbed a book for myself and settled down in a chair not too far away.

For several minutes, I managed to become engaged in what I was reading, and then Nessie chose to lower her book and address me.

“I was babysitting Simone the other day,” she began.

I lowered my own book, one eyebrow raised in Nessie’s direction. “And?” I asked. She babysat Simone frequently these days. Often, Emily would call Nessie to come over just so she could go to the grocery store with one young child instead of two. It was like Nessie was constantly on call.

Nessie shrugged, but I knew that she had a reason for bringing it up. “Simone said some things,” she said vaguely.

Simone had been in the other room that day that Rebecca had come back to La Push. That was the first thing that came to mind when Nessie said her name. However, Simone had been in the other room, not with us, and she was only five. What could she have passed onto Nessie that would bring her all the way over here to talk about it.

“And?” I repeated, trying to sound clueless even as I felt my heart speed up.

“None of it made sense at first,” Nessie continued, “because she only gave me bits and pieces, and I had to put it together for myself. She was saying stuff about soulmates and listing off the soulmates she knew. She included you and Embry, and she said something about Kim and Emily confirming it. And Sam too, she said.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. Sam had told Simone that Embry and I were soulmates? There was no way in hell that I believed that.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I questioned.

Nessie shrugged again, holding her book up as if she were shielding herself from my glares.

“She was babbling on about some conversation you’d had with Emily, Kim, and Rachel. At least that’s what it seemed like, and I thought it was interesting.”

Maybe I had been wrong to think of Nessie as smarter than the average preteen. No matter how book smart she was, she remained lacking in common sense. A large part of me wanted to say as much to her, but I could imagine the upset look on her face. I didn’t want to deal with that, so I bit my tongue.

Instead, I said, “We talked the other day.”

“About soulmates,” Nessie tried to get me to confirm.

“Yes, about soulmates, but I don’t want to talk about it again.”

Despite her attempts at creating a shield, my angry and defensive tone didn’t appear to be putting Nessie off my case. She got up from the couch, placing her book on the coffee table, and moved over to sit on the armrest of the chair I occupied.

I was tall enough that she didn’t dwarf me, but she was perched so that her head was above mine, which made me feel uncomfortable. Now I really did feel like I was being attacked, even though I knew Nessie didn’t mean for it to come across that way.

“I get it,” she said, forcing me to crane my neck if I wanted to look at her. I used that as an excuse not to. “But I wanted to tell you that I agree with them. That you and Embry are soulmates, I mean.”

I let out a few choice words, and it was a testament to Nessie’s growth in at least one area that she didn’t flinch when she heard the words.

“Why does everyone keep telling me that?”

Nessie frowned, looking confused. “Because we believe it. Obviously. I know Jake does too. I was talking to him about it yesterday after the stuff with Simone happened.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.

Nessie ignored me, plunging on. “And then Quil heard, and he said that he knew Embry was either going to marry you or no one at all when they were kids. So I think it’s safe to say that means he thinks you’re soulmates too.”

“Fuck.” I couldn’t believe she’d… “Did you have to go and talk to everyone about it?”

Her frown deepened. “I don’t get what the big deal is. We already thought it. It’s not like I was gossiping or anything.”

“I think you need to look up what gossiping means,” I told her. “I don’t care what they think they know.”

Nessie looked at me critically. “Embry wasn’t around, if that’s what has you worried.”

I scoffed at her even though that was, in fact, what had me worked up.

“Whatever,” I said, not feeling like there was a better counter argument in this position. A four-year-old was trying to lecture me about emotions and romance. I wanted out of this conversation. If I knew her at all, Nessie wasn’t going to allow that.

“Why did you break up with him?” she asked instead of reading my mood and acting accordingly. “It’s because you don’t believe he’ll stay with you forever, right? You don’t believe us. You don’t believe him.”

“No offense, Ness, but you’re four. On top of that, you were imprinted on before you met your mother once you were out of the womb. You can’t understand. You can’t know what it’s like to be in a relationship, let alone one where there’s no imprint.”

Her nose wrinkled in dislike. “I think I’m happiest Jake imprinted on me,” she began, “because people seem to make relationships complicated when there’s no imprint. How do people live like that?”

I let out a derisive snort.

“Not easily,” I informed her. “Not easily at all.”

“Right. But it’s because of you, not the world, so you can’t do much complaining.”

I tilted my head up to glare at her, but because of her position over me, it didn’t feel effective. Nessie still looked too proud of herself.

“Go back to your book,” I snapped.

She offered me one sad smile as she stood up and moved back to the couch. She continued to look too proud of herself for what she had said, but I was determined to act like I didn’t notice.


	10. October

**October 15th, 2010**

I was starting to live under the assumption that everyone around me was working against me, even if they were doing so in my best interest. I found it easier to draw away than to confront them and continue to voice the arguments that they would never take seriously.

Doing so was easy when Rachel went back to Seattle and Joselyn and I continued to communicate primarily through text messages. I could pretend like the people I was talking to didn’t think I’d screwed up and ruined my life.

At least, I should have been able to. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to shake the uncertainty that had been forced onto me.

Maybe that was why I wanted to talk to Seth.

My brother had, after all, played such a large role in forcing me to realize my feelings for Embry in the first place. He’d pushed and pushed until I had no choice but to acknowledge them. Even if he’d begun to do so to avoid telling me about his own feelings for Al, I knew that he’d also done it out of care for me.

However, he’d remained quiet since I broke up with Embry, and that left me surprised. When so many others around me had spoken up in a way they never had before, why had Seth avoided doing the same?

I figured he had to be busy with his own relationship. The one he’d been certain was doomed once he graduated high school but that was still going strong. He didn’t have time to fight with his older sister about something she didn’t want to discuss.

And I should have been thankful for that, so why was I standing outside of his bedroom trying to convince myself to knock?

“Leah, will you just come in?” he called through the door once he’d gotten annoyed with listening to me fiddle around outside.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open to find Seth sitting on his bed, laptop open in front of him and a textbook at his side. He was doing work for one of his online classes, which happened to be the solution he’d discovered for the very problem he’d been scared of a year before.

“Can we talk?” I asked, taking a few hesitant steps forward.

Seth nodded, lowering his laptop screen and moving everything aside to make room for me across from him on the bed. Seth watched me as I sat down, and I didn’t need to ask what he was thinking about.

“Is this about Embry?” he asked. In most other circumstances I would have felt frustrated that someone had read me easily. As it was, I only sighed and gave a slight nod. Of course it was. There was no use pretending differently.

Seth mirrored my nod, but he didn’t say anything else like I had been expecting him to. I waited a moment as if he might keep talking, but when he raised an eyebrow, I realized that he wasn’t going to talk until I did.

“I just…” I stopped and tried to think through what I wanted to say. Something I hadn’t done before I’d shown up at Seth’s door. For some reason I’d been sure that giving him the opening to say something would lead to Seth doing the talking. Then I would only have to respond.

But when faced with the responsibility of talking first, I had no choice but to tell the truth.

“Everyone thinks I screwed up. Absolutely everyone. I’ve been lectured by a four-year-old. How is it that you haven’t done the same?”

This didn’t seem to be what Seth had been expecting. His eyes widened, and I could tell that he was having to think carefully about what he wanted to say to me.

“I figured you were hearing it enough,” he said. “You’ve been upset lately. No need to make it worse.”

My heart hurt knowing Seth cared. It was a little ridiculous how touched I always felt when Seth did things like this because I always knew that Seth was the most kindhearted person on Earth.

“But you agree with them,” I clarified, needing to hear whether or not he did. For reasons unknown to me, it felt important even as I ran from the same opinion when it came from everyone else.

Seth watched me, a frown wrinkling his forehead.

“You want to hear it from me?” he asked, sounding unsure of himself.

“I’m not some porcelain doll. I can handle whatever it is you’re thinking.”

Seth sighed, fiddling with a piece of paper that was sticking out of his textbook.

“It’s not like that,” he said. “I don’t think my words alone are going to have an effect. I just feel like you’ve been dealing with a lot, and you don’t need one more thing weighing on you.”

“No one else seems to think that way. They operate under the belief that if they’re loud enough I’ll come to my senses.”

Seth shrugged. “Yeah, I know. But after how long it took you to realize you had feelings for Embry, I think that sort of thing will only make you more stubborn. I don’t think you’ll realize that everyone’s right before you have the realization by yourself. You’re someone who has to have a personal moment of realization. I don’t think I’ll make that happen.”

“But you agree with them?” I pressed, very aware that he had yet to answer the question.

“I do,” he admitted. “I agree that you’re meant to be with Embry.”

“But he might imprint,” I said.

“So could Al or I,” Seth pointed out.

“That’s so different…”

“How?” Seth asked, and for the first time, I could detect fear in his voice. For the first time, I realized that I wasn’t the only one who had these fears about imprinting. Seth had worried about him or Al imprinting too, and I’d never considered that a possibility.

They were together. They were happy.

“It’s not different,” Seth continued. “Either one of us could. I mean, no one’s ever imprinted on a guy, but we know so little when you stop to think about it. For all we know, I could. So it’s a possibility for either one of us. Just like it is for you and Embry. But if I let myself dwell over that all the time, I’m going to be miserable. Al and I have already dealt with too much to let that hang over us. So have you and Embry, which is why it upsets me so much that you’re letting this fear get the better of you.”

“You know that’s different. You and Al have always been different.”

Seth scoffed. He never seemed to be as capable of derision as he was whenever I voiced any opinion about us living entirely different lives. “It’s not. You choose to believe that it is,” he said.

“Okay.” I paused, thinking. “Let’s say that I believe that it is the same type of thing. How do you manage to be with Al then? How do you not let the fear and doubt get the better of you?”

Seth shrugged. I knew from the look on his face that he wasn’t sure what his answer was, but he still managed to come up with one.

“I guess I focus on making things work. It’s not like I’m an expert. It took a long time for me and Al to get our shit together. We still screw stuff up all the time and have to fix it. We’ll probably keep doing so for the rest of our lives, but I try to screw up as little as possible and to fix things when I do screw up. As long as both of us keep doing that, I think we’ll be alright in the end. So would you and Embry.”

I groaned in frustration, allowing myself to flop down on the bed with my legs hanging off the side. I couldn’t find the energy to sit upright anymore. “How do you make it sound easy?”

Seth shrugged, not sure himself. “I’ve said what was on my mind. I’m not sure that any of that is easy.”

When I bothered to think about it, I supposed it wasn’t. It was hard to do what Seth had described. That was why I’d been unable to keep doing it. Would I ever be able to maintain that? And not only maintain that myself but trust Embry to maintain it too? For the rest of our lives?

I groaned. It was tempting to lay there forever and not deal with the mess I’d gotten myself into, but then I would be doing the exact opposite of what I was beginning to realize that I needed to do.

**October 27th, 2010**

Seattle was loud. That was always my biggest complaint whenever I visited. It was loud and dirty and just generally unpleasant. Not that I had much of a frame of reference to compare it to. I imagined New York City as something analogous with hell in my mind, so Seattle looked rather great in comparison. But I didn’t like it.

One of the reasons I’d never escaped La Push might have been the fact that I hated cities.

There was also the phasing into a wolf thing, but whether that had happened or not, I doubted I would have left. If I had, it wouldn’t have been to come to this place. No matter how much Rachel loved it.

“Is it this loud when you’re trying to sleep?” I asked Rachel, staring towards her living room window in what could only be described as disgust. There were so many noises that it was overwhelming. Sure, I’d been able to adjust to Port Angeles over time, but this was another level.

“I don’t think it sounds as loud for me as it does for you,” Rachel pointed out, setting a glass of water down on the table in front of me.

She settled into a chair of her own, and I couldn’t help but be fascinated by how at ease she looked in this apartment. It was little more than two rooms. The house she and Paul had owned hadn’t been anything spectacular, but this was still, by many standards, a downgrade. Yet Rachel had a certain spark as she sat in it that hadn’t been there when she was living in that house.

“I guess not,” I agreed. “Lucky for you.”

Rachel shrugged. “It is louder than La Push, but you get used to it.” She twirled her glass around in her hand, looking down at the ripples it created in her water. “Paul complains about it sometimes too, but I think he’s getting used to it when he visits.”

“Or he’s too happy about seeing you to bother with complaining for once,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

Rachel smirked, but I could see a hint of sadness there. “I guess that could be why.”

There was a moment of silence, and I took that as an opportunity to pick up my glass of water and take a sip. I could tell that Rachel was thinking about something, and I figured I would give her the time she needed to say it.

When she did, I nearly spit my water back into the glass.

“So… We’ve been planning Paul’s move up here. Kind of.”

I coughed a few times, and I could feel my eyes stinging as I replied. “Kind of?”

Rachel shrugged. “I guess not ‘kind of’. We’ve been planning it. He’s trying to find a job before he moves here.”

I couldn’t do anything but stare at her. Yes, the entirety of both packs knew that Paul had been attempting to quit phasing for this very reason. If this had been months ago, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but it wasn’t months ago. In the time since Paul had begun his mission to stop phasing, we’d been slapped in the face with the Volturi’s new threat.

“But he’s phasing again,” I said in disbelief. “He’s training with us to fight the Volturi. The Volturi who could attack us soon. You remember, the reason why everyone is on high alert? The reason we need every single wolf in La Push?”

Rachel glared at me, not happy that I was speaking to her as if she were a three-year-old, but I couldn’t help but believe it was warranted. There was no way she could think such a move was a possibility, and I felt beyond angry with Paul for encouraging her when such a thing was hopeless.

“He’d only be in Seattle,” Rachel replied as if Seattle was a short drive from La Push and not more than a hundred miles away. “He’d come if anything happened. It wouldn’t change much.

I snorted. “Wouldn’t change much? It’s not like he could snap his fingers and apparate to La Push. We don’t have some advanced detection system. Our safety is at the mercy of Alice’s visions, which the Volturi know about. There’s no way of knowing if they could work their way around her and sneak up on us. We could die before Paul made it back to La Push.”

“Then why are you in Seattle now?”

“This is one day, Rachel. I’m not saying we have to give up our lives in fear of the Volturi, but Paul living here is different. It’s not plausible. And I’m not saying this to be an asshole. I’m saying it because Sam’s never going to allow him to do it. You know as well as I do that he’ll issue an alpha order to keep Paul there. Paul has to know that too. He’s not moving to Seattle until the threat is over, and I don’t understand how you could think differently.”

The glare Rachel gave me was murderous. “Leah, I’m trying to stay optimistic about life. I know you’ve accepted staying in whatever dark place you inhabit and that you’re okay being miserable forever. That’s fine. I’ve given up trying to convince you to change that. But do you have to ruin everything for the rest of us?”

“Ruin…” I felt familiar tremors run through my body, but I hadn't phased in so long. I knew that I wouldn't now. “I’m trying to tell you the truth. This isn’t me being pessimistic. This is me looking at reality. I’m not the one who’s going to keep Paul in La Push. If you want to be angry with anyone about that, then be angry at the Volturi. They’re the reason for this shit. It’s not like I want to die in some giant battle. I’d be happy if Paul could move here, you two could live in eternal bliss, and I would get to stay alive, thanks.”

Rachel had gone quiet, staring down at the floor. “You’re right,” she admitted. “I know it’s not realistic, but I want it to be possible. I really do.”

I sighed, feeling myself deflate. “I know. I want it to be possible too if I’m being honest.”

Rachel glanced up at me with a small smile. “I’m happier in Seattle than I was in La Push. I feel like I belong here, but it wasn’t a magical cure for my depression. It’s still hard. Everything is difficult somedays. And I can’t help but wish that Paul was here. That that would help make a big difference.”

I looked at her, feeling sad for her instead of angry at her. With Rachel far away again, I often managed to forget that she was still struggling with depression. She was better at hiding it through our limited communication through phone calls and text messages than she was face to face.

“But you know it wouldn’t, right?” I said cautiously. “You can’t keep holding out for a magical solution, Rachel. Didn’t you say the same thing to me once? If you keep acting like something or someone is going to save you, you’re never going to get better.”

I saw a flash of anger in her eyes, and for a second, I thought she was going to cuss me out. Maybe even demand that I get out of her apartment. But a second later there was a glint of sad acceptance in her eyes, and I wanted to sigh in relief.

“I know,” she whispered. “I keep trying to tell myself that, but it’s hard not to…. It’s hard not to wish for it.”

I nodded. How often had I wished to be saved from everything difficult in my life? I got it. I got why Rachel clung to what little hope she had for an easy way out.

At the same time, I knew that I would only hurt her more in the long run if I didn’t try to snap her out of it. She wouldn't get better otherwise.

That was why I felt angry at Paul for humoring her. No doubt he didn’t want to hurt her. He’d been cautious of that recently. I didn’t feel like that excused stringing her along like this. No matter how much happier it made her in the moment.

“I don’t like thinking about the Volturi,” Rachel admitted. “Even though I don’t know how scary they are. I never got to see them.”

“You don’t want to,” I said with a shiver. “I don’t want to think about it either.”

Rachel nodded, giving me one last sad smile.

“I guess we have to hope for the best.”


	11. November

**November 5th, 2010**

As I moved down the aisles, I recited the grocery list in my head. Shopping for food was one of my least favorite chores because of how monotonous it felt.

The store was small, and I’d had the floorplan memorized since I was five when I’d tried to steer my mother in the direction of the candy without her catching on until I could snare her in. Grocery shopping trips these days meant heading straight for what I needed, grabbing it, paying for it, and leaving. No stops that weren’t necessary.

I rounded the corner into the cereal aisle, freezing when I saw Tiffany Call debating between two boxes that she held in her hands.

How had I not been able to tell that it was her before she was right in front of me? I cursed myself.

Of course, there was no one else in the aisle, and when Tiffany realized that someone was there, she glanced up. I never had a chance of getting away, cart and all, no matter how quick my wolf reflexes were. I was too frozen in fear to think straight.

Her eyes flickered away at first, not having expected to have landed on me, but she glanced back again, this time taking in the details of my appearance.

I expected anger or, at the very least, annoyance. I hadn’t seen Tiffany Call since breaking up with her son, and that had been on purpose. It had become an art. One that I developed as ardently as the art of avoiding her son, although I was less talented at the latter all things considered.

“Leah,” Tiffany said out of surprise. She hadn’t been expecting to see me either, but I was shocked when the edges of her mouth tilted up in a small grin.

“Hi,” I said quietly. Hearing the rasp of my voice, I cleared my throat. “Hi,” I repeated. “It’s, uh, it’s nice to see you.”

Tiffany smiled and turned to place both of the boxes she had been holding back in their respective places on the shelf. I felt my heart hammering in my chest, and I wondered if there was a way for me to escape while her attention wasn’t focused on me. She turned around before I could work up the nerve to abandon my cart and flee.

Having done so would have humiliated me the next time I saw her, which was sure to happen. You couldn’t avoid anyone in La Push forever. There always came a time when you had to face it and talk to them. This was going to be that moment for Tiffany and me.

“How are you doing?”

I hadn’t been expecting that question from her, let alone for it to come right off the bat. My eyes widened as I looked at her, taking in the honest curiosity and, I struggled to believe it, care that her expression held.

“I’m fine,” I told her.

Her neutral expression turned into a frown as she heard my generic answer to her question, but I wasn’t sure what else there was for me to say. I wasn’t about to open up and tell Tiffany Call that I felt like shit because I was still hung up over her son who I had dumped. That wasn’t a conversation you had with your ex’s mother, let alone in the supermarket.

“How are you?” I asked before she could say anything else. Her frown deepened as she realized that I was going to keep this conversation as firmly in the territory of smalltalk as I could.

It’s not like such a thing should have come as a surprise to her. Tiffany and I had never had a conversation that one could consider deep. Most of the times we’d talked had been little more than an exchange of a few words or sentences. Most of what I knew about her came from other people. Primarily Embry. We’d never gotten to know each other, and such a thing was not going to happen when she was the mother of my ex.

“I’m fine too,” she replied sardonically.

I played along, muttering, “Good, good.”

Tiffany shook her head, and I knew I wasn’t getting away with it. My fear was only increasing as I remained standing there. The anticipation over when Tiffany would bring up Embry was about to drive me to insanity. I was almost to the point where I thought that I might bring him up myself to make the madness stop.

“How are you really?” Tiffany asked this time.

I let the question linger between us as I debated my answer. Clearly, the same answer as before wasn’t going to cut it. I had to say something to get her off my back, but I wasn’t sure how truthful I could be without facing other consequences.

“I…” I looked around the aisle, taking in the various cereal boxes that I hadn’t shown this much interest in since I was a child. “I’ve been better,” I settled on, hoping that would be enough.

It was the truth.

Tiffany nodded as if I’d given her an answer that she approved of, but she didn’t look any happier. She sighed and took a few steps in my direction, pushing her cart along with her.

It was the first time I had realized that the length of half the aisle still separated us. Not the sort of distance kept between two people holding a normal conversation. Yet her advance felt threatening, and I had to fight against the urge to back out of the aisle all together.

“Yes, Embry keeps answering me the same way when I ask him that question,” she said as she came to a stop at what should have been nothing more than a reasonable distance. It still felt like she’d invaded my personal space.

My heart skipped a beat at the mention of Embry even though I’d known it would come.

It had been months since the break up, yet Tiffany sounded sure that any odd behavior on the part of either Embry or me had to be due to the break up. I could tell from the way she looked at me, and she was right, of course. At least about me, but it felt off putting that she would feel so sure of herself that she needed nothing more than a vague answer from me to have her suspicions confirmed.

I didn’t say anything else in response. I wasn’t sure what I could say. While I had always admired Tiffany, I’d never talked to her much. Somehow, she’d always managed to put me on guard for some unexplainable reason. I felt that again now, and it drained any desire I might have had to converse with her.

She sensed this too, which was a new development. In the past, she had always acted like we were close. Like she was some kind of second mother to me despite how little we communicated. The fact that I didn’t know what to do or say around her had never seemed to cross her mind. She was oblivious to it. Or at least I had always thought so.

Now, though, she inspected me, taking in the unsure looks and tense posture. A look of realization came over her face as she saw how clueless I was over what to say next. There wasn’t a sense of judgment there that I had been expecting, however. I had expected Tiffany to be angry with me after everything I had done. I had thought that she wouldn’t show me any mercy. Instead, a soft, careful expression passed over her face.

Her eyes were more caring than they had ever been, at least when they were directed at me. If it was possible for me to regret breaking up with Embry more than I already did, I would have after receiving that look.

“Sweetheart,” Tiffany said. I tensed as I felt her hand touch my shoulder. She sensed it too, and withdrew from me. I relaxed when I felt the weight of her hand lift from my shoulder, and she sighed as she continued to take in my appearance.

There was a moment of silence where I stared down at my haul. I tried to remember my shopping list and compare it to the items I had already placed in the cart, but my mind could only focus on Tiffany still standing there. The list didn’t want to come to the forefront, and instead, I zeroed in on a bag of rice, willing Tiffany to walk away.

She didn’t. I listened to her shuffle around as she tried to figure out what to do, but she didn’t leave. I waited with dread for her to speak, and when she did, I tried to brace myself for whatever the words might be.

“I was happy when I heard that you and Embry were dating,” she began. The words surprised me enough that I looked up at her, not expecting to see the small grin that graced her lips. While I had known Embry was likely to come up again, I hadn’t expected it to be in that way.

“You were?” I asked, my voice raspy from my nerves.

Tiffany gave a little laugh at that, causing my stomach to twist into knots. “Of course I was,” she replied as if it had been obvious. “You know,” she leaned towards me conspiratorially, “Embry still seems to think I was never aware of his crush on you, but it was damn near impossible for that. He used to blush bright red each time he was near you. It was hard to miss. Even when he was a toddler, he was smitten. The two of you were adorable when you used to come into the store with your mother. He got excited whenever you came to play with him.”

I looked away again. I’d heard both my mom and Embry tell me about this part of the past, but I’d never heard Tiffany Call speak about it. I’d never stopped to think about what she must have thought about me all those years ago. It had never seemed important. I would have been nothing more than another little girl who happened to be the child of one of her friends. I hadn’t known that my actions were inspiring any lasting feelings, not in Embry and certainly not in his mother.

“The way you made him light up,” Tiffany continued, “was enough to make me fond of you, and I guess that fondness never went away. Possibly because the way you affected him, the way you made him happy, never stopped.” She took another step closer, causing me to glance up again. “It still hasn’t stopped. It might seem like it has with how terrible you’ve both felt, but it hasn’t.”

I shifted on my feet, putting an extra inch between us in an attempt to breathe easier. “I know it hasn’t,” I replied in a whisper, unable to believe that I’d worked up the courage to say that much. I could feel the heat in my cheeks as I spoke. “Nothing’s changed.”

Tiffany nodded, looking satisfied that I’d given her such an answer. Her grin was larger than it had been throughout our conversation, and I was surprised at how little sadness she seemed to be showing considering our topic of conversation. I’d expected to get anger from her above all else, but here she was proclaiming her fondness for me and managing to look happy. It was like I had stepped through a looking glass without realizing it.

“The two of you are something else,” Tiffany said. I watched her, almost mesmerized. “I never found true love, although I thought I had for a while. I’ve even entertained the idea a few more times since Embry was born, but it never comes through in the end. I guess I still have some years left, especially with Embry out of the house. But that’s not the point. The point is that even I can see what you and Embry are like. It’s the same sort of thing that I’ve never had, and I know that means that you’ll work it out in the end. I’m not worried.”

“Not worried even though I broke your son’s heart. Shouldn’t you hate me?”

I couldn’t let those worries linger in the air any longer, and I winced as I admitted I had them, sure that I’d managed to crack through to some inner anger within Tiffany that she’d been concealing. But she only laughed again.

“We all have to deal with heartbreak, sweetheart. You did before this, and I think experiencing it for himself will prove good for Embry in the long run. You’ll both get your happy endings.”

I stared at her in shock, unable to believe anything she had said. With a wink, Tiffany pushed her cart past me. I stared after her as she left, still unable to believe the entire encounter had happened.

Before long, I would surely be discovering that I had crossed over into an alternate universe.

**November 13th, 2010**

Tiffany’s words tumbled around in my head for the following week, joining the chorus of words from just about everyone in my life.

All of them thought I’d fucked up, even if some of them were nicer about how they said it. Even Tiffany’s kind words held the same message as Rachel’s brash ones. They built upon each other in my thoughts until they were creating a racket that I couldn’t escape from throughout the day and night.

They weren’t thoughts that I could ignore, and with the consensus screaming at me, they weren’t opinions that I could discount either. At first, I had been able to, repeating my mantras about doing the right thing to myself.

Now my previous confidence had been trampled into the dust.

I’d fucked up. I’d known that I’d fucked up for ages, even since the beginning, but I’d been convinced that having fucked up meant that I was doing the right thing by getting out of Embry’s life. So, I’d countered fucking up with continuing to fuck up instead of trying to fix anything.

Because I was the worst human being.

And I was going to continue to be the worst if I didn’t fix anything.

There was a lot of noise coming from inside the apartment. I could hear it when I was down the hall. The fact that it didn’t fade as I approached meant that they were clueless to my presence outside, too caught up in whatever it was they were doing inside.

I knocked, and everything happening inside paused. I heard their voices hush and the giggling stop. By the time Jacob pulled the door open, I was wringing my hands. Behind him, I could see Claire and Nessie sitting on the floor across from each other as if they had been playing before looking up at me in curiosity. Quil was further behind them, sitting on the couch.

Embry wasn’t in sight, but I knew that he was somewhere inside.

“Leah,” Jake said, sounding stunned to see me. My heart hurt knowing that this wouldn’t have been strange in the past. These days I rarely stepped foot here, and when I did, it was only for pack business. “What’s up? Do you need something?”

Jacob didn’t make a move to let me inside the door, almost as if he didn’t think I’d want to come inside.

“I need to talk to Embry,” I stated. It was as simple as I could be about my intentions.

Jake’s eyes widened. While I kept my attention on him, I could see Quil, Nessie, and Claire watching me from the living room, Nessie even leaning over to get a better look at me without Jake obscuring her view.

No one said anything for a moment. Just as I was about to lose my nerve, Jake came to his senses. “Right. Okay. Wow. Um, come ahead inside, and I’ll...I’ll go get him.”

I nodded, stepping inside the door as Jake moved out of the way. He hurried down the hall towards Embry’s room, almost tripping in his haste. I sighed. It wasn’t like I was unaware of how much everyone else wanted us to get our shit together—or, rather, for me to get my shit together—but I, admittedly, hadn’t expected Jake to look that eager at the possibility.

Quil and the girls were staring at me in silence, and I summoned up my best glare despite my nerves. It only worked on Claire, who turned away once my eyes found her. Nessie continued to stare, mouth open as she gawked. Quil, on the other hand, smirked as if he had known all along that this would happen and he wasn’t surprised. I zeroed my gaze in on him.

“What, Ateara?”

He shrugged, looking too pleased for someone who hadn’t done a thing. He leaned back against the couch, arms crossed, like he was the one in charge. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just about damn time.”

I rolled my eyes and looked away, listening for any sounds coming from down the hall. If Jake and Embry were talking, they were doing so in whispers low enough for a wolf not to hear from the living room. I imagined that they had to be reading each other’s lips, and that knowledge did nothing to settle my nerves over what was being said.

By the time Jacob came back down the hall, I’d managed to convince myself that Embry didn’t wnt to see me. My heart stuttered when he appeared behind Jake.

The entire walk to their apartment had consisted of me trying to prepare myself. I thought I’d managed well enough that I could keep my composure, but just seeing Embry walking down the hallway with the knowledge that we were about to talk was enough for me to feel like my legs were about to give out from underneath me.

He only glanced at me, keeping his eyes on the carpet beneath his feet more than anything else. It hurt my heart to see him like this.

When he and Jake reached the living room, they stood there awkwardly, the silence hanging between us.

“So,” Jake began, rubbing his hands together, “Quil, why don’t we take the girls to the park?”

“It’s past dark,” Embry said with a roll of his eyes, his voice sending a jolt down my spine. “Stay here. Leah and I can go, right?” he asked, turning to look at me.

It was hard to get my brain to work, but I did manage a nod in response. It was what I had been planning on from the beginning, but I hadn’t been able to get as much out before Embry spoke. “Right,” I said after too long of a silence.

I turned to walk towards the door, catching a glimpse of Quil trying to hold back his laughter. It was tempting to reach out and shove him, but doing so might have revealed how my hands couldn’t stop shaking. Instead I focused on opening the front door and not embarrassing myself.

Embry’s footsteps were quiet behind me, but I could sense that he was there as if we were magnets being pulled towards each other. I didn’t glance back at him until we were in the parking lot of the apartment building.

“Can we go to the cliff?” I said, being careful to say ‘the cliff’ instead of ‘our cliff’ like I was inclined to do.

Embry’s eyes widened at the request, but he controlled his features quickly, giving me a short nod of consent.

This had been my plan from the beginning. The cliff felt like the right place to have this conversation, but I was also aware that, if this went wrong, my memories of the place would be ruined forever. I didn’t want that. If there was one particular place where I had fallen in love with Embry, it was our cliff.

But I didn’t let myself worry about would could happen in the coming hour, or, at least, I tried not to let myself worry. Instead, I tried counting my footsteps as we made the walk, Embry as quiet as ever behind me.

I hadn’t thought of how to handle the silence on the walk to the cliff when I had been planning to ask him to come with me. I wished that I had, so I could have had an idea of what to say that wasn’t my carefully rehearsed speech that I planned to give once we reached our destination.

With nothing to say between us, I let the silence linger and tried to pretend as if it were natural. It had, after all, not been strange for Embry and I to share silences. There just hadn’t been this same sense of discomfort in the air back in those days.

Finally, the trees thinned and the top of our cliff came into view. I hadn’t been here in months. That visit had been too painful with the knowledge that I no longer had Embry at my side, and I hadn’t come back since.

Seeing it now brought back so many memories that it was overwhelming, but remembering how many peaceful mornings had been shared here also helped boost my confidence that I could fix what had happened between us.

It had to. I didn’t know what I would do otherwise.

Still not speaking, I settled into the spot I had always taken in the past, and I felt elated when Embry did the same, not shying away from me and sitting somewhere else. No, he was close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his body, and that gave me more comfort than anything had up to that point.

That relief was short lived as I remembered that the time had come for me to confess. Embry’s continual frown didn’t help settle my nerves as I tried to prepare myself.

“I love you,” I blurted out before I could lose my nerve. It wasn’t the opening I had been going for, but it would have to do. There was no turning back once the words were in the air between us.

Embry’s expression softened enough for me to notice, but he still frowned, watching me as if scared that I was about to hurt him all over again.

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to continue, trying not to chicken out based on Embry’s response. “I never stopped loving you, and I know that you know that. I was always scared of saying those words though. Like they held the power when they didn’t. The power was in what we felt for each other, and that was there whether we were willing to acknowledge it or not.

“But I was scared of that, and I panicked. Obviously. You know that, so I shouldn’t force us to relive it, but I couldn’t escape this idea that fate wanted my future to be doomed, and somewhere along the line, I became convinced that was my fault. I was the reason I couldn’t have a happy ending. My relationships were doomed to failure, so...I doomed our relationship by breaking up with you.

“I know that’s the stupidest fucking thing I could have done. It became this self-fulfilling prophecy, and it was idiotic of me not to realize that before I did it.” Tears had begun to fall down my cheeks, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop them. Not when I could see them shining in Embry’s eyes too. “I was terrified. Of you. Of the future. Of everything, and even though I swore that I was helping you by getting you out of the relationship before it could implode, I just fucked everything up on my own.”

Embry watched as I struggled to control my breathing. My tears were still falling, but I wasn’t yet crying enough that my vision was impaired by much. Embry reached out and brushed the moisture off my cheeks, causing me to shiver.

“I figured it was something like that,” he said as calmly as I would have expected.

It was next to impossible to read his emotions, and I had prided myself on beingg able to do so before the breakup.Now I was left wondering if time had destroyed that skill or if, in this particular instance, Embry putting on a mask more effectively than ever before.

“Leah,” he said, and my name came out sounding so pained that my stomach tightened. “I don’t know what to say to you. There is nothing to say. I know you were scared, but you shouldn’t have been, and I know you already realize that.”

He cut himself off with a sharp intake of breath.

There was a new look in his eyes. Something unusual for Embry. It scared me, not knowing what it meant.

This was the most lost for words I had ever seen Embry. He wasn’t one who always needed to speak, but when he did, you were able to tell how much thought he had put into what he was saying. Not now. He was struggling to put his thoughts into words. For once, I didn’t feel like I was fumbling through a conversation that Embry had already mastered.

At any other point in time, that might have left me feeling relieved and thankful, but in that moment, I felt scared above everything else. This wasn’t like Embry, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“It scares me,” he admitted, voice wavering. “The idea of being with you after what happened.” I sucked in a deep breath and held it as I listened. “After what happened... I do still love you. You have to know that, but it scares me. What if I trust you again, and in another bout of panic, you throw it away again? Leah, I don’t know if I can live in fear that you’ll bolt on me.”

The silence fell between us again, but this time, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his.

Steeling myself, I said, “You’re saying that you’re scared of the future. You once warned me against that exact same thing, didn’t you? You’ve told me over and over again that I need to stop worrying about that, and I’m here now telling you that I’ve realized that for myself. Are you going to be the one to run now?”

Embry stared at me in shock. While the words had flowed from my mouth with such passion and sincerity that I hadn’t been capable of sounding unsure of myself, the immediate aftermath left the reality of what I’d said pressing in on me from all sides.

I held my breath until I was unable to take it anymore. I had to take the words back, but as I opened my mouth to say them, Embry leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. I sunk into the kiss, unable to believe that it was happening but also unable to deny the reality of the feeling that engulfed me.

There was no way to know how long the kiss lasted. It felt like an eternity and a split second all rolled into one. Either way, Embry pulled away too soon, and I couldn’t help the stab of fear in my stomach as he did so. What if he thought he’d made a mistake by kissing me? What if that kiss hadn’t meant anything?

Those doubts and questions began to fade as Embry kept his face close to mine. He’d pulled away far enough that we could make eye contact. I could still feel his breath on my lips, and that didn’t stop the tingling sensation traveling down my spine.

I waited with baited breath for Embry to say something. I could see it in his eyes as he worked out the words he needed to use, and there was a sense of comfort in so familiar of a wait instead of an anxious need to escape.

“I don’t want to be scared either,” Embry said, even as I could see a hint of fear in his eyes. “I don’t. I want to be with you, Leah.”

I watched him, trying to discern his intentions. “Embry, just this once can you please be explicit? What are you telling me?”

Embry took a long, deep breath. “I’m telling you that I want us to have a second chance even though it scares the shit out of me. I’m not sure when it will stop scaring me, but you’re right, I can’t let myself run. It’s only a guarantee that we’ll both get hurt instead of a chance. I’d be a coward.”

“You wouldn’t-” Embry cut me off with a sharp look, so I didn’t try to defend him from himself. If Embry thinking the other options made him a coward meant that he would take a chance on me, I supposed that I shouldn’t be arguing against it anyway.

Instead, I kissed him again, reveling in the feeling of being able to do so.

I still wasn’t sure about the future, but I wasn’t allowing myself to think about that. It would only ruin the present.

**November 27th, 2010**

It would have been nice if I could say that the next two weeks held a magical quality that led to everything negative disappearing. If I could say that Embry and I went right back to how things had been. If I could say that we were so wrapped up in each other that we managed to forget the rest of the world.

None of that was true. Most days I struggled to remember that we were together again. Largely because the sense of unease that had settled between us was proving harder to get rid of than I had anticipated.

The happiness of those around us felt awkward under the circumstances. Everywhere I went, someone wanted to congratulate me. It was shocking even after knowing that the people in our lives wanted us back together. I hadn’t been prepared for the level of celebration that accompanied mine and Embry’s new relationship.

Embry couldn’t either. I could see it from the overwhelmed expression he got everytime we were faced with such congratulations while together. We had to struggle to get through them. That was all we could do.

And I may have snapped at a few people to shut up, leading to confused looks on their part, but I knew it would be brushed off under the assumption that I was still just a bitch. I’d found a lot of my questionable behavior got excused that way by others, regardless of what was behind my intentions.

No one other than the wolves of our pack expressed any worry over the fact that I remained unable to phase, even as Embry once again joined in the pack training sessions with no problems. Each day, I tried, and each day it failed once again. Embry and Jake assured me that it was fine, but each day brought a new level of panic as I obsessed over what could be wrong.

There was a sense of jealousy that sometimes bubbled up in my stomach when I remembered that Embry was one with his wolf once again, but I refused to let that become a barrier between us.

Despite how difficult our relationship often felt, Embry and I were trying, and that was all I could ask for. It was more than I had dared ask for not that long ago. When it felt like things were hopeless, I reminded myself of that.

Once again, we were meeting each other on our cliff each weekend morning to watch the sunrise. I kept wishing that it was possible for us to do so during the week, but between school and work, it couldn’t be done. We had managed to on Thanksgiving before being forced back into reality due to the pack festivities that included both my family and Tiffany.

That day had felt awkward to an extent that nothing leading up to it had managed, and that Saturday, as Embry and I sat on the top of the cliff, sunlight beginning to peek over the horizon, I could feel the aftermath of it.

“When do you think it will feel normal again?” I asked. I’d been debating the answer to that question by myself for days, but this was the first time I had voiced it to Embry. It was the first time I felt like I had the courage to say it.

Embry was startled by the sound of my voice, stiffening for a moment before relaxing again. Or at least relaxing as much as he had been before, which was to say not as relaxed as I would have liked. He grinned at me though and reached out to take one of my hands in both of his, running his fingers along my skin.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’re not worrying about the future, right?”

I rolled my eyes at the terrible attempt at a joke. “That’s not the same thing, and you know it.”

He sighed. “I do, but I don’t know what else to say in response. There’s no good answer.”

I nodded before leaning over to rest my head on his shoulder. It was comforting and something I had longed to do again for so long. That hadn’t changed much. Embry felt the same next to me. Feeling his warmth still comforted me. It was those sorts of things that reminded me that we were still us, and we’d be okay.

I knew we would be. We had to be.

Sometimes it was difficult to keep the fears at bay. I had let them in too much in the past for me to have a strong enough system to keep them out at all times now that I was trying. Embry seemed to be going through something similar, and knowing that made it easier for me.

“What if we went and got married? Just showed up at the courthouse, signed some papers, and then we’d be stuck with each other. Maybe that would get us over it.”

When Embry didn’t respond, I lifted my head, taking in his wide-eyed expression. I tried to swallow around my dry throat. “It was a joke,” I clarified. “Just a joke.”

But my own pathetic attempt at a joke felt like the worst idea I’d had all day now that I saw Embry’s expression.

He shook his head as he saw me falter, but it was hard to feel any better about myself once I’d seen his initial reaction. “I know it was,” he said, but I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth. I also wasn’t sure why I’d thought it was a good idea to bring up marriage, even as a joke, considering how things had been between us. “It just caught me off guard,” Embry continued. “I didn’t know what to do, but Leah, it’s okay. Really.”

I nodded, not saying anything else. I’d been trying to break the tension, and instead, I had created more of it.

Embry’s fingers began tracing shapes onto my skin again, but he trailed them up further along my arm, not confining himself to my hand.

“I do want to marry you, Leah. Someday. I don’t want to show up at the courthouse tomorrow and be done with it. That works for some people, but it’s not what I want.”

“Me either,” I admitted, feeling breathless from Embry’s words.

Embry looked up at me with a smirk. “Good,” he said. “Then we’ll get there someday.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's only one more chapter of the story. It's so strange to think that I'm almost done posting four stories in this series. Anyway, I'm going to get that chapter up within the next day or two. You won't have long to wait at all. I should wait to get all sentimental until then.


	12. December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter. Here we go.

**December 15th, 2010**

My relationship with Embry was becoming normal again. That became apparent as we approached the one month mark of being back together.

As it turned out, however, my relationship drama and the adjustment period to a new relationship had been a great distraction from the other going ons of the pack. With the other aspects of my life under control, I was hit in the face with the threat of the Volturi. A threat only made more terrifying by my inability to phase.

Mine and Embry’s worries about the future might have been unfounded. We might wind up dead in a month or so’s time for all we knew. Hindsight made our worries about anything else look ridiculous in comparison, but I wasn’t the only one becoming more worried about the threat as time went on. The fact that the entirety of both packs had been invited to the Cullens’ house was a sign that some big shit was about to go down.

Since that first day when we had confronted them, Jake had relayed information between the Cullens and the wolves. Now we were expected to sit in front of Bella and Edward and listen for ourselves, which sent alarm bells off in my head.

I was on high alert before I stepped foot in the house, but to be fair, the strong smell of leech was enough to do that to me.

The place felt empty this time even though the space had never felt lived in whenever I’d been there before. There was always a sense of artificiality that must have been caused by the fact that it was occupied by vampires. With Bella, Edward, and Nessie the only ones left in Forks, it felt like a real ghost house. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought no one had stepped foot in it for years. Actually, the place was spotlessly clean, so perhaps it felt more like one of those fancy show houses that realtors took potential buyers to. The ones you knew were an ideal of the house, not the way it would look once someone lived there.

That was the least of my concerns today as I settled onto the couch beside Embry, pressed close to his side to make as many seats for all of the wolves as we could.

Bella and Edward stood before us, making themselves the center of attention. Bella looked almost nervous, but it was hard to tell what Edward was thinking.

“What is it that you wanted to discuss?” Sam asked the vampires.

He, too, had remained standing, taking one side of the room while Bella and Edward stood at the other side. Jake was standing too, but he was behind Sam, up against a wall. Nessie hung from his arm like she was scared. Understandable considering how the other times the packs had faced her family had gone.

“Alice’s visions have changed,” Edward announced. It was enough to have the attention of every wolf, if he hadn’t had it already.

Everything seemed to hinge on Alice’s visions, and despite mocking such visions as unreliable in the past, I knew that the guys were placing a strong importance on them in determining whether we would live or die.

“What are they now?” Jake asked.

Edward wasn’t keen to share the details, which didn’t help my anxiety as Edward didn’t often seem worried about sharing bad news with us. Sometimes I thought he reveled in it, and the fact that I could have such a thought without a glare from him, only confirmed to me that this was serious.

If I’d needed that confirmation after everything else.

“Something happened among the Volturi,” Edward continued. “Alice can’t figure out what as she can’t see the past, but something has them angry in a way they weren’t several days ago. Alice was already paying close attention to them, and the change was so sudden that she collapsed when she received the new visions.” I gripped Embry’s hand as Edward continued to speak. “They’ve sped up their plans to attack us, although Alice still can’t see how soon that means they’ll come. In vampire time, it could still be a while.”

“‘Still be a while’ but not as much of ‘a while’,” I quipped, earning myself a frown from Edward. I’d have considered myself a failure if I managed to be in his presence for any extended period of time without eliciting that response.

“You could put it that way,” he responded wryly.

I wanted to continue to mock him. It would have made the fear that had iced over my stomach easier to deal with. Maybe it could have pulled my attention away from the goosebumps I could feel along Embry’s skin or the way I could see my little brother burrowing closer into Al’s side. Maybe I could forget all of it and focus on the fleeting amusement of annoying Edward.

None of it would do any lasting good, so I didn’t say anything more. Instead, I gripped Embry’s arm in the only way I knew to bring him comfort in a room this full.

Tomorrow, the wolves would train again. This time more frantically than ever, but for now, that was all they could do. I didn’t even have that.

**December 20th, 2010**

Jacob paced the room in what had become a familiar fashion. I was sure it was even more familiar to Embry and Quil than it was to me. I’d missed a lot of this during the time I’d avoided their apartment like the plague.

I pushed that from my mind. It wasn’t the time or place to feel regret.

“I don’t understand why they’re doing this,” Jake ranted as he went back and forth, back and forth. I sat on the couch between Embry and Quil, watching him in silence. “Carlisle’s, like, five hundred years old or something. Why does he think bringing the Denali to Forks is a good idea? All it does is put a larger target on our backs.”

“Does it?” Embry spoke up. All I could do was mentally curse him. Jacob had worked himself up into a state, and Embry was going to direct that onto himself instead of the room at large. “It can’t be any worse than having Bella and Edward and Nessie here. They’re the three the Volturi really want alive, right? Along with Alice?”

Jake looked confused for a second, like Embry had made a point that he hadn’t considered, but he was soon back on track.

“Well, yeah, but that’s kind of a liability, isn’t it? The Volturi want them alive. They’d prefer the others dead. Maybe that means they’ll attack England first, but if they know the Cullens are bringing in other vampires, then it looks like we’re planning to fight.”

“We did it before,” Quil pointed out. “There were a lot more vampires here last time than a handful of the Denalis.”

Jake sighed, stopping his pacing to lean against the wall.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what it means. All I know is that we have more vampires to deal with, and we’re never going to be ready for whatever the hell is coming. I’m...I’m lost.”

“Aren’t we all?” I asked.

The three of them turned to me, but they didn’t answer my question. They couldn’t because none of us knew what should be said.

The future was a mystery, and while I’d begun to find a strange sense of relief in that as I clutched Embry’s hand, this was one time where I still wouldn’t have minded being a seer. One far more knowledgeable than Alice Cullen. Maybe then I could have given us some peace of mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone for reading, especially anyone who's taken the time to read all four stories in this series (and possibly even the Seth story).
> 
> Here's the plan for the future. There is a fifth story in this series that is written and less than half the length of this story. I'm going to post that as a one-shot in the next couple of days, so be on the lookout for that. After that, there will be a one-shot epilogue to the series that is significantly shorter, but as that's still being written, I can't promise when you'll see it.
> 
> I hope every one sticks around for the fifth one as well.


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